8/28/2023 0 Comments Wing pro crackThreats of political violence continued in different incarnations, with Donald Trump supporters threatening election officials who certified votes for Biden and members of school boards that pushed for COVID-19-related restrictions also facing threats. Several officers who responded to the insurrection later killed themselves.ĭishearteningly, many Republican elected officials refused to join efforts to investigate the violence, playing down the danger and obscuring the facts. Three others died from being trampled, a heart attack, and a stroke. The day after the insurrection, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, whom rioters had assaulted and pepper sprayed, died of a stroke. Police officers killed Ashli Babbitt, whom many Trump supporters later portrayed as a martyr, as she was climbing though a broken window of a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s Lobby, where police officers were evacuating members of Congress. Capitol to prevent the certification of the election of Joe Biden as president.įive people died in the fracas. The year began, of course, with an insurrection at the U.S. In 2021, political violence and the threat of violence appeared increasingly common - even if terrorist attacks, narrowly defined, were not. Yet a narrow focus on terrorism and other high-profile forms of violence against civilians misses much of the problem. Perhaps most heartening, their violence usually backfires, decreasing public support and making it more likely that the government will crack down. They disagree on which targets to prioritize and who should lead, and many of them are unskilled in clandestine operations, making them easy prey for law enforcement when it decides to focus on the problem. Simply paying attention to the problem makes arrests and other forms of disruption more likely and scares many of those who might organize for violence, limiting their activities.Īlthough white supremacy and other right-wing extremist causes have many supporters, the groups themselves are disorganized, and the movement is riven by infighting. The federal government has also launched an ambitious set of investigations, focusing on the January 6 insurrectionists and bringing hundreds of them to trial. In June, the administration released a strategy for countering domestic terrorism, attempting to lay out both the different facets of the threat and how various security agencies should respond. In a shift that will have positive long-term consequences, the Biden administration has made right-wing terrorism a priority. As discussed below, other forms of right-wing violence remained a problem, but there was no high-profile attack in 2021 like the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting or the 2019 El Paso Walmart attack, which killed 11 and 22 people respectively. According to statistics from the New America Foundation, 2021 saw zero deaths in the United States from right-wing terrorist attacks.
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