A woman helps a girl write on a memory board to mourn victims of a mass shooting in front of an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, the United States, on May 8, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

According to analysis and data compilation by Google's Jigsaw project, white supremacy has become the leading motivation for terrorist attacks committed in the United States of America. An increasing number of terrorist attacks have been committed by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis every year since 2011. In 2018, white supremacist terrorism hit a record high, with 48 mass murders.

The data ends in 2019, but that's not the end of the story. On May 14, 2022, a racist white man who believed that non-white people were "replacing" white people committed a shooting attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 13 people, 11 of whom were African-Americans. Nearly a year later, on May 6, another white supremacist carried out an atrocity in a suburb outside of Dallas, Texas.

The killer, clad in black tactical gear, his skin covered with tattoos of fascist imagery, including a Nazi swastika, jumped out of a car outside of an outlet store and began shooting indiscriminately. He unleashed dozens of shots in three minutes, hitting 15 people and eventually killing eight. Dallas is a diverse city, so the victims were diverse. They included a Korean-American family, two Hispanic school children, and a South American man seeking refugee status in the U.S. He had journeyed thousands of miles across countries, seeking safety, only to end up shot dead by a racist in an outdoor mall.

The murderer had expressed his hatred of Asians, Jews, women, and other minorities in online posts before the attack. He wrote about his desire to incite a race war. This was not an isolated incident. 

According to the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacist terrorists were responsible for 84% of the terrorist attacks committed against the United States. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned, "Terrorism in the United States will likely increase over the next year in response to several factors." The report also showed that over 90% of all terrorist attacks in 2020 were committed by right-wing terrorists.

U.S. President Biden acknowledged the threat of white supremacist terrorism in his commencement address to Howard University, a historically black college, on May 13. He said that white supremacy is "the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland."

In fact, it was a racist terrorist attack that inspired Biden to run for president in the first place, he said. "In 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, crazed Neo-Nazis with angry faces came out of the fields with – literally with torches, carrying Nazi banners from the woods and the fields chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the '30s ... That's when I knew – and I'm not joking – that's when I knew I had to stay engaged and get back into public life."

Biden pointed out that progress is followed by pushback. The United States has seen this trend play out. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2012, gun sales and hate groups proliferated. Obama was symbolic of made-up threats white supremacists perceived; they didn't want to be governed by a black man, and they thought whites were losing their power.

Then Donald Trump ran a racist campaign in 2016, capitalizing on racial resentment, and he won a closely fought presidential election. Now the U.S. has its first Black and female vice president, and Trump is trying to run for president again, emphasizing the same racist and misogynistic message. 

When Trump lost the presidential election in 2020, he tried to convince the courts to overturn the election results. When that failed, he incited a riot at the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the Biden administration. That failed, too, and now Trump and the Republican Party are defending the rioters who have been sentenced to prison. Trump himself faces criminal charges for alleged financial fraud, but he still leads the Republican primary polls.

The next two years could be increasingly dangerous for the United States as Trump will continue to fan the flames of white supremacy and attack the integrity of U.S. elections. If he loses again, he will likely rely on the same tactics of rioting and spreading fear about minorities to try to steal the election again. This time, he will have had practice.

Mitchell Blatt is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

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