Rich Lowry writes at National Review Online that the nation’s top law enforcement agency should focus attention on violent white supremacists.
At some point in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI was running the KKK.
It infiltrated, manipulated, and ran the Klan into the ground. The name of the operation: COINTELPRO–White Hate (cointelpro meant counter-intelligence program). With violent white hate again on the rise, we should take some inspiration — even if the methods can’t be replicated — from the FBI’s past grappling with racist extremists.
If there was any doubt that the country has a white-nationalist problem, the shocking attack on an El Paso Walmart should remove it. These self-radicalizing freaks, who are a subset of the broader mass-shooting phenomenon, take inspiration from prior acts of vicious mayhem and cheer high body counts on Internet message boards. They are domestic subversives and terrorists, and deserve to be treated as such.
There is no doubt that if we suffered a string of massacres on our soil carried out by Islamic radicals, we’d do everything in our power to diminish and hopefully eradicate the danger — indeed, we have. The national response to the racist extremists in our midst should show the same alacrity and resolve, while acknowledging that they represent a different, more-difficult-to-counter threat than the old Klan did.
