Congress Will Hold Hearings on White Supremacist Violence Next Month

They have been trying to do this for a good long while, but conservatives kept stonewalling. Gee, wonder why…

A series of hearings to address the growing threat of White nationalism will be held in the next few weeks by the House Judiciary Committee in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand shooting by a White supremacist and the recent arrest of a Coast Guard lieutenant who spoke of committing a similar crime.

According to the Daily Beast, the committee expects in early April to bring in officials from within DHS and the FBI for questioning on the rise of white nationalism in the U.S and the efforts the agencies are currently adopting to combat it. In October, Rep. Jerold Nadler, the top Democrat in the committee, asked then-committee chairman Bob Goodlatte to hold such a meeting because of three incidents he felt should have prompted the Judicary Committee to look into, the killing of 11 people allegedly by a racist gunman at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, more than a dozen explosive devices sent to prominent Democratic political figures and the shooting deaths of two African-Americans at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky by a gunman who allegedly tried to carry out a larger-scale attack at a predominately black church, all in the same week. Goodlatte, rejected the request, as has been the case several times in the past few years, even when such a call was made for hearing after the tragic “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA which saw the death of a person protesting the event at the hands of a neo-Fascist attending. Since then, the control of the House shifted to the Democrats, and Goodlatte, who did not seek reelection last year and is no longer in Congress was succeeded in the chairmanship by Nadler.

On Friday Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian white supremacist described in media reports as part of the “alt-right” and heavily influenced by right-wing figures in the United States, including Donald Trump, reportedly launched an attack on the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 persons while livestreaming the killings on Facebook. In a “manifesto” reportedly written by him, be implied that future attacks will happen soon. The Christchurch attack comes almost a month after a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that he was reportedly planning to use in a similar attack in the United States targeting politicians and journalists.

Eight years ago this month, then-House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King held a series of highly controversial hearings titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response,” that was seen as a Islamophobic attack on that community. When Representative Bennie Thompson noted this and also said that such hearings should be expanded to deal with right-wing terrorism such as that committed by neo-Nazis, King replied, “There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and neo-Nazis, environmental extremists or other isolated madmen,” saying further that “to back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee — to protect America from a terrorist attack.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, every terrorist killing in the United States in 2018 was tied to right-wing extremism.