https://www.google.ca/amp/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2017/2/8/14552098/sean-duffy-white-terrorists
"The argument that this was a one-off incident is just false. These attacks have popped up time and time again throughout the West. It’s not just
the Quebec mosque attack that occurred last month or
the 2015 Charleston mass shooting at a black church. They have occurred so frequently that Ben Mathis-Lilley managed to compile
a list of 32 fatal white extremist attacks since Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, including attacks by Ku Klux Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller in 2014, neo-Nazi Keith Luke in 2009, and white supremacist James von Brunn in 2009. (And it doesn’t even include attacks outside the US, like
the 2011 Norway attacks by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik.)
And the statistics, in fact, show that right-wing extremist attacks, often carried out by white supremacists and nationalists, have typically killed more Americans in most years than Muslim jihadist terrorist attacks since 9/11. (Although deaths from terrorism are very rare in the US: As my colleague Zack Beauchamp
noted, deaths from terrorism by Muslims, as one example, make up one-third of 1 percent of all murders in the US.)
These attacks aren’t happening in a vacuum; there are organized groups encouraging these kinds of atrocities in America. Consider, for example, that the KKK is the US’s original terrorist group, inspiring the first federal antiterrorism law —
the Ku Klux Act — ever. The Southern Poverty Law Center has
a frightening map of hate groups, ranging from neo-Nazis to other white nationalists, that number in the hundreds in the US. And some of these groups have grown in the past few years — such as the alt-right, a fringe far-right movement with racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic views.
We also can’t ignore the rise of right-wing nationalist political parties in the West over the past few years — driven largely, according to
the empirical research, by hateful attitudes toward immigrants and Muslims. After all, Alexandre Bissonnette, the 27-year-old who attacked a mosque in Quebec last month, was
reportedly a fan of far-right-wing politicians like France’s Marine Le Pen and President Donald Trump.
Many of these groups’ leaders will say they don’t advocate for violence. Alt-right leader Richard Spencer, for example, has
said he wants a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of America — an obviously absurd and extremely hateful proposition. And Le Pen’s party
called the Quebec mosque attack “deplorable.” (Trump, however, has not addressed the attack publicly.)
But when you trade in rhetoric that’s explicitly hateful toward minorities, it’s not really surprising that some members will take that message to an extreme, as has happened time and time again in America and other Western nations."
