EUGENE PURYEAR: I think that's a great question. I think one to think about this is that the most active Nazi terrorist group in America, Atomwaffen, which in just the past eight months has been linked to four murders or attempted murders and a number of their members have been arrested with an extreme amount of explosives, so a very dangerous group. Most people in America have never even heard of them. The Justice Department maintains they cannot refer to these individuals as "domestic terrorists," because the domestic terrorism statute or whatever is not robust enough and they would be inexact. But we've seen the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions actually end the program that was designed to be aimed towards white Americans who may be attracted to this form of extremism.
I think the discrepancy here is troubling because I think what we see is that people who are protesting pipelines are considered to be "terrorist." The Movement for Black Lives is now considered to be a breeding ground for terrorist extremism, the same thing for anti fascist protesters and the like, and without any real evidence to say that this is at all relevant or important. And I think what we have to see here is that one set of groups is challenging power in a very serious way while another set of groups, while they may be very violent and disruptive, is reinforcing the themes that this society is founded on, white supremacy, patriarchy, racism and bigotry and xenophobia and the like. These are really values that are as American as apple pie.
I think that, quite frankly, the Justice Department, the government and really the broader society is unwilling to actually embrace the fact that inside of white America, there's an extreme, radical strain of xenophobic, bigoted individuals who are willing to use violence and terrorism to push their goals forward because to do that means you really have to grapple with white supremacy in our society, what its roots are, how deep it goes and why people feel justified doing these sorts of things. I think that's challenging to people in power because there is no legitimate reason why there should be so much focus on Islamic terrorism or Black Identity Extremism or whatever when we know that white supremacist terrorists have committed the most terror acts here on US soil.
There is no discrepancy there that, to me, would be understandable other than the fact that there is something behind these organizations that people don't really want to dig into, who are in positions of power. I think that's very troubling. And I think we are being remiss to not put something together here that we've seen Darren Seals, we've seen Mr. Crawford. We've now seen Mr.
, I believe is the name, in Charleston, Black Lives Matter activists who have been killed in very suspicious circumstances when we know that there are active white supremacist terror groups that are actively telling their members to pursue lone wolf attacks. I don't want to say one is definitely connected to the other, but to me, I think we have to start looking at these things in the same conversation or I think we could miss something that's very dangerous in our society.
