Global Affairs Expert Webinar: Counterterrorism and Homeland Security
Bruce Hoffman, the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at CFR, and Jacob Ware, research fellow at CFR, colead the conversation on counterterrorism and homeland security.
These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation.
Speakers
Bruce Hoffman
Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security
Council on Foreign Relations
Jacob Ware
Research Fellow
Council on Foreign Relations
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Fall 2025 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We’re delighted to have Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware with us to discuss counterterrorism and homeland security.
Dr. Hoffman is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a tenured professor in Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he previously served as director of both the Center for Security Studies and the security studies program, and director of the Center for Jewish Civilization. He has spent nearly five decades studying terrorism and insurgency with a focus on far-right extremism, counterterrorism strategy, and homeland security.
Mr. Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. He also serves as an adjunct professor, again at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. He is the survivor fellow at Everytown for Gun Safety and nonresident fellow with the illiberalism studies program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Dr. Hoffman and Mr. Ware are the coauthors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, which was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press, and it was the recipient of the Airey Neave Book Prize.
So thanks, both of you, for being with us today. Bruce, I thought we would start with you to talk about the current threat landscape and highlight the main challenges to counterterrorism and homeland security.
HOFFMAN: Sure. Well, thanks very much, Irina, for having us. And thanks to everyone who’s attending this webinar.
This morning, when Jacob and I were texting and discussing, you know, what we would basically talk about, the one thing that stood out that we—that we can’t avoid is really the tremendous destabilization we’ve seen in the United States over the past week with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And especially this morning, it’s important to note how often throughout history terrorism has been politicized and has been seized upon to advance a particular—one particular side or one particular political cause. And this morning, if anybody has seen the news, apparently the Department of Justice has taken down a 2024 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study. In other words, the National Institute for Justice funds research, often by leading academicians across the United States, and this was a study using Department of Justice and NIJ statistics that charted the patterns of politically motivated homicides in the United States. And it concluded that since 1990, unequivocally the violent far right has been responsible for more political homicides and, indeed, terrorist incidents than the violent far left, 227 incidents since 1990 with 550 fatalities. The left wing, by comparison, was responsible for forty-two incidents and committed seventy-eight of the homicides.
And no matter where you look—Center for Strategic and International Studies, their work, for example; Cato Institute, for instance, reports that since 2020, using their own data and their own methodology, approximately half of all the politically motivated murders in the United States were perpetrated by far-right extremists, forty-four compared to eighteen by left-wing extremists.
And then in some respects, the gold standard is the Anti-Defamation League, because they have been charting hate and violent crimes in the United States motivated by hate, anti-government extremism, intolerance for decades now. It’s fascinating to note that they also reached the exact same conclusion using their own datasets and their own methodology that over the past decade 76 percent of all the politically motivated homicides in the United States have been committed by right-wing extremists or far-right extremists—white supremacists, anti-government extremists. And number two was actually Islamist—domestic Islamist terrorists or extremists, at 18 percent.
So, clearly, it’s not to say that any one particular category of politically violent entity has a monopoly on committing political—I mean, politically motivated homicides or violence that, for want of a better term, we would call terrorism, but clearly the pattern has been for the past several decades that it’s coming from the far right. And in fact, that was why five years ago, when Jacob and I sat down to write God, Guns, and Sedition, we wrote a book about the trajectory of violent far-right extremism and violence in the United States and not these other groups, because it was so salient and so significant.
So that’s one thing I want to say, is that we can politicize terrorism—it will always be politicized—but when you have a number of different data points all pointing in the same direction we have to accept, firstly, this is a very violent country, we know, whether it’s politically motivated or completely apolitical crimes. There’s far too many deaths. But in terms of politically motivated crimes, there is a significant threat from the far right.
What we’ve seen in recent years, going back at least until 2017—just in recent history—but certainly over the past year is a tremendous uptick in assassinations or assassination attempts, which have come from both sides. Again, this is something that no one political extremist on the spectrum has a monopoly of. But it’s very troubling that we’ve had, you know, two assassination attempts, for example, on President Trump; the terrible murder of the former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman, and her husband this past summer, and the very serious injuries that were inflicted on Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife.
But what I want to talk about—and then turn over to Jacob—is that, yes, it’s compelling, it’s tempting, it’s attractive always to put a political label on these crimes, but we may now be entering an era where there’s a new paradigm where we can’t put a left or a right label on these things. And this is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about since the terrible murder of Charlie Kirk because we still don’t have a really clear picture of Tyler Robinson’s motivations, even though he is being described by multiple sources as a leftist. I’m not entirely sure, at least in my view, from the evidence that one can discern—and I have to emphasize this is very preliminary, and I likely know nothing more than anyone else on this call; I’m just channeling what I read in the newspaper or hear on the news. But just this past spring, very significantly, the FBI announced a new category of domestic terrorism, and it’s called the nihilistic violent extremist (NVE), and let me read you the definition. It is an individual who engages in violence or criminal conduct motivated by a deep hatred of society and a desire for its collapse by sowing chaos, destruction, and social instability.
And one thing that Jacob and I wrote about in God, Guns, and Sedition is how accelerationism—this belief on the part of political extremists, particularly on the right but not exclusively—and we say that this is a Marxist-Leninist concept that both extremes have adopted. But in other words, it’s where you have a body of individuals who are convinced that the political system as it currently exists is so paralytic, and so sclerotic, and so ineffectual, and doesn’t answer their needs that they just want to pull it down. They just want to create chaos. And interestingly, this is—as I’ve previously said, it’s not something that either extreme has a monopoly on. Somewhat ironically, I think both extremes have embraced the same mindset of this accelerationist philosophy and what the FBI calls NVE or salad-bowl ideologies.
And then the last thing I’ll say before turning it over to Jacob, as Irina very kindly noted in her introduction, I’ve now been studying terrorism for forty-nine years, so nearly fifty years. What is really distressing me to an extent I haven’t seen this since the 1960s and 1970s, is that increasingly terrorism is being accepted and legitimized in certain circles; that people are choosing which kind of politically motivated violence they support, which they don’t, and then very selectively applying the terrorist label to it.
Also, we see, as a fixture at many demonstrations across the country, for example, terrorist flags regularly being flown—including the flags of terrorist organizations that are second only to al-Qaeda with the amount of American blood on their hands. But just in the—you know, the past week, for instance, a musical opened lionizing Luigi Mangione, the murderer of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare executive last—(audio break)—playing to sold-out audiences. And all these things taken together, I would argue, are very disturbing. And suggest we’re—as I said, we’re at a different paradigm in our understanding of terrorism, where traditional political distinctions might not matter. But where calling out and condemning all forms of terrorism, which was certainly the case after 9/11, is eroding. So thank you.
FASKIANOS: Thank you, Bruce. Let’s go to you, Jacob.
WARE: Sure. Well, thank you, Bruce. Thank you, Irina, for convening this extraordinarily poorly or well-timed webinar, depending on how you see things.
Bruce, I think you laid out the terrorism landscape perfectly, with several of the emerging trends. I thought I would flip the question on its head and look a bit at counterterrorism. I’m sure everybody on this call was as troubled and traumatized as I was by the reaction—the reaction across the aisle to the terrible events of last Wednesday. Where, on the one hand, you had some people who were celebrating the violence, others who were warning of crackdowns on an entire political party. I’ve been surprised that among all of that noise we have not had more of a question about prevention, about why our efforts to prevent that incident failed. Of course, we had that conversation at depth after the Trump assassination attempt last summer.
So far in 2025, we’ve had an obviously catastrophic jihadist-inspired incident in New Orleans. That happened during the last days of the Biden administration. But since then we’ve had terrorist incidents in Washington, DC, a very well-known and tragic one; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, an attempted assassination of the governor of Pennsylvania; Boulder, Colorado; Minneapolis, of course; Palm Springs, California; and I would also add an incident that happened just an hour after the assassination of Charlie Kirk at a high school, Evergreen High School, in Colorado, where a nihilist violent extremist with seemingly neo-Nazi and incel beliefs attacked a school there, gravely wounding two students before taking his own life.
We are failing in 2025, so far, to prevent terrorism. And according to the START Center at the University of Maryland, there has been an 85.5 percent increase in terrorist attacks so far in 2025 from prior years. So terrorism across the ideological landscape and, as Bruce pointed out, with an absence of ideology, or at least the nihilistic worldview, seems to be on the rise. And I think the Trump administration at some point needs to be asked a question about these rising levels of violence. Not just who’s perpetrating them, but why we are no longer succeeding in interdicting these plots.
I would point to three things that I think are important and can hopefully set up the broader conversation. The first is the erosion of deterrence. And, yes, I’m talking, of course, about the pardons related to the January 6 cases. Since then, I worry that we have begun to take away the sense of punishment, the sense of deterrence that surrounds people who commit acts of violence. Of course, the justice system serves two purposes, to punish and deter. And when you prove to people, when you allow people to escape with clean criminal records from attacks that happen against U.S. democracy, you’re sending a signal to the American people that violence will be tolerated, that violence is permissible if it’s on behalf of one political party. And that is obviously extremely dangerous as we try to conduct counterterrorism in the long term.
The second element is the redirecting of counterterrorism resources towards immigration. Now, not my place. I’m not an immigration expert. It’s not my place to talk about the scale of the immigration problem or how much law enforcement we need. But I do know that agents who worked on January 6 cases, and of course many of those are counterterrorism experts at the FBI, were systematically purged from their jobs after this new administration came in. That includes over the summer, the former special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City FBI office. So the predominant FBI office in Utah. That woman was a counterterrorism expert. Redirecting these resources away from prevention of political violence, prevention of terrorism, towards other issues—they might help us fight those issues, but they are going to have an impact in the terrorism space. And that’s kind of a given. And we have to therefore, I guess, recalibrate our expectations of how much violence our society is going to face.
The third element is, frankly, the evisceration of our prevention infrastructure in this country that had been built painstakingly over the twenty-four years since 9/11. Much of that work happened at the Department of Homeland Security, and happened to be one of the first targets of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts in government. And so the grassroots organizations, the NGOs, that have worked to prevent violence, that have worked to bring in people like Tyler Robinson—I mean, of course, that’s a hypothetical—and tried to guide him away from violence, tried to guide him away from radicalization, those organizations are suffering now. And they are no longer able to do that work on a daily basis that played such a role in preventing violence in our communities.
And so I’m not sure if we need to be recalibrating our expectations and we need to accept that we’re going to face this level of violence—not because the left is more violent or because the right is more violent, but simply because we no longer prioritize counterterrorism. Or, whether that’s going to be reversed in this administration. It will remain to be seen, but I certainly think it’s a relatively grim context today to be working in counterterrorism, especially in the federal government. And people increasingly are starting to pay the price for that with their lives. And we need to—we need to consider how much of that we’re prepared to take before we seek to correct those cuts.
Thank you, Irina. I’m happy to take any questions.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you both. So we are going to go to you now for your questions.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So I’m going to go first to a written question from Roy Pettis, who’s an adjunct fellow at George Washington University. And he was the intelligence fellow here in residence at CFR back in 2021 to 2022: I keep thinking of C.P. Snow’s, “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.” Are we just returning to the mean in which violence to enforce the status quo is the more common state?
HOFFMAN: Gosh. That’s a very good question. Well, obviously, you know, every government and state exists to impose and continue the status quo. Terrorists, by definition, are always revolutionary, are always pushing back against the status quo. And that’s why I brought out this—and highlighted the FBI’s embrace of nihilistic violent extremism as yet another category of terrorism, because it seems the traditional political dimensions that we looked at violence are changing enormously, and are challenging that status quo and also challenging our understanding of political violence—at least, our traditional understanding of political violence. Which connects to what Jacob was saying, is that at a time of uncertainty and instability and new emergent trends, we need more research not less, and circulating more studies not burying them.
WARE: Just one quick thought there, Irina, because I’m thinking back about the first Trump administration. Certainly, we’ve seen a rise in domestic terrorism over the course of the past ten years or so, I would say. Charleston, South Carolina was ten years ago this past summer. And it’s been an open conversation since then, I think, whether terrorism—and I’m talking more here about far-right violence—is more common, or is going to be more likely, if the perceived leader of that movement—if their perceived figurehead is in power or not. And during the first Trump administration, certainly we saw a significant rise in far-right terrorism in our country. That was really the story, as Bruce pointed out, and the origin of our book.
I mean, a lot of that begins at Charlottesville, but you then see a rise in far-right violence that runs through Pittsburgh, right, the deadliest antisemitic terrorist attack in U.S. history, El Paso, the deadliest anti-immigrant terrorist attack in U.S. history. New Zealand suffered a devastating attack in 2019 in Christchurch. And then, of course, we ended up on January 6. So we did see that correlation of higher rates of far-right violence when their perceived ally was in the White House. Maybe it’s different this time. Maybe we see more of a reaction this time. I’m not sure. I think it’s too early to say. Those questions will play out over the course of the coming years.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question, raised hand, from Mojúbàolú Olúfunké Okome.
Q: Thank you. I’m Mojúbàolú Olúfunké Okome, professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Thank you very much.
I am puzzled about the responses to outbreaks of violence—you know, gun violence—because there’s no discernible, generalized, bipartisan outcry, and also public outcry, against gun violence, whether it comes from the nihilistic violence extremists or from other sources. Instead, when these things happen there’s a counterproductive advocacy for Second Amendment rights to bear guns, and then the weaponization, increasingly, of descriptions and definitions of terrorism, who’s a terrorist. And increasingly also, from the federal government, the use of state power to target particular communities for perceived—you know, for being the perpetrators of this violence, even when that cannot be connected with even the facts that one sees from reading the media and hearing news reports. So given this kind of circumstance, what is the prospect that the problem of gun violence will be addressed in ways that contributes to the well-being, and really security, of ordinary citizens?
WARE: I can give those a go, Bruce, if you like. Well, thank you so much, Professor Okome. I think there’s two questions there, and I’ll try to tackle them both. One is about gun violence and one is about the response to this moment, and our failure to be bipartisan about it. And let me just—let me just offer a very dark reflection regarding the second of your questions. Bruce and I, over the course of the past few years, in our writings, we’ve cited a series of polls that have been released—I think it’s by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland—that ask the American people basically whether violence can be justified—and they always use different language—in defense of your political views, or to save the country, or against the other party.
And, living in a democracy, you would think that the number of Americans who believe that violence can ever be justified would be relatively low. You’d say, you know, hopefully it’s somewhere between 2 and 5 percent, and we have a minority who believe that way. The numbers—and, again, we’ve cited them in a lot of our work. The numbers are stunning. And the numbers are stunning among both parties. So frequently Republicans will answer something like 35 percent believe violence can be justified. And in the last poll among Democrats, it was—it was a similar number. Obviously, this is now during the Trump administration. So 30 to 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans believe that violence can be justified in defense of their own views.
That is an enormous headwind for us to face in counterterrorism, when there’s that level of kind of violence mobilization and violent imagination in our country. It’s really hard to know how to reverse that. And the ultimate conclusion of it is, if you assume that violence is taboo, that violence is disliked in our country, then your assumption is wrong. And we need to rethink our assumptions. And we need to go from that new reality. Violence is no longer taboo in our country. It’s now normalized. And it’s—again, it’s really hard to know how to reverse that process.
On the gun violence question, I’ll just say one thing. Again. I should reiterate what Irina said at the start. I am a fellow with an organization called Everytown for Gun Safety outside of my work with CFR. So I am—I’m a gun violence survivor myself. And I’ll just point out to an unfortunate quote from Charlie Kirk himself, that was—that did the rounds after his terrible death. Which was he’d said a few years ago after a school shooting that a handful of gun deaths every year is worth—is the price to pay for a Second Amendment. That is the belief that circulates among the political right in this country.
Activists and politicians have fought against that ironclad mentality for years. But I suspect that even Charlie Kirk’s most devout supporters would advocate still for what he said all those years ago, which is, unfortunately, this is the price that you have to pay, that they wish to pay, for maintaining their Second Amendment rights. There has never been—in my view, there’s never been any crack in that mindset. So it remains—and it remains a real counterterrorism challenge as well, when weapons are so widely available.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Wayne Taylor, who’s assistant professor of homeland security and intelligence studies at Eastern Kentucky University. It’s a two-part question: How do you see shifting political norms, intensified polarization, and digitally networked subcultures influencing the radicalization pathways and operational resilience of nihilistic violent extremists? And what mixed methods research designs can meaningfully capture these evolving dynamics, without amplifying their propaganda or causing harm to vulnerable communities?
HOFFMAN: Well, that’s a great question because it’s certainly topical, in the case of Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s murderer. We know that he did spend time in the digital universe. Indeed, on the bullets that were found, engraved on the casings were various memes that had been popularized on gaming platforms, that were very familiar with people in digital media. And, you know, one sees, of course, that social media has been weaponized in many respects, regardless of its original intentions of bringing people together and enabling them to socialize and make friends. It’s like the internet. I’m old enough to remember in the 1990s when the internet was supposed to be an engine of enlightenment that was also going to bring people together and was going to provide the truth to an extent that had hitherto been impossible and would put everybody on a level playing field of knowledge. And we see how that’s unraveled.
And very much so with social media, and encouraging this kind of violence. And I would have to say also, it’s hand in glove with why the FBI has embraced this new category of nihilistic violent extremism. I’m not sure that could exist in a non-digital world, because it’s certainly that sense of nihilism. And that sense of kind of wanting to be comedians of the apocalypse. I mean, it’s filled with irony and post-irony, with satire and jokes that go right up to the line, in many cases, of advocating, encouraging, inspiring violence. And, tragically, in some instances, the line’s crossed, in animating violence. So certainly, the digital subculture is a huge part of what we’re seeing now, and perhaps even of this paradigm shift that, I argue, we may be witnessing with the old labels no longer being as applicable.
What to do about it? Of course, as an academician you raised exactly the important question. But in this environment, I mean, we see that grants, research institutions that focus on this are being shuttered. And, I mean, look, if money—if cancer research isn’t being funded, we see that even research in political violence is also being eroded. And it’s at a particularly, I think, perilous time that we’re going to have to cope with these profound changes and potential upheavals, at a time when we have—we’ll have a shrunken knowledge base from which to assess, chart, track, and then come up with policy recommendations to ameliorate, or at least to redress them.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Dessie Zagorcheva, who’s a political science professor at CUNY: I agree that politicization of extremism can have, and it’s already having, very negative consequences on our ability to prevent attacks in the future. What can leaders, the media, and society do to address this politicization?
HOFFMAN: I think the simple answer is, call out all terrorism. And not choose which terrorism conforms to one’s base or one’s constituency, but to view it all as—just as Jacob described, in a democracy it’s astonishing when you have a third of people surveyed of both political parties that believe that violence can be justified against the federal government. And I think that’s a reflection of the partisan nature and the politicization of terrorism. And we just have to—I mean, this is a threat to our core democratic values. We have to understand that. But unfortunately, the trend, I really fear, as I said earlier, is going in the other direction.
WARE: I would just add real quick—hi, Dessie. Good to hear from you. I would just add quickly to what—to what Bruce said. In this moment particularly I would also just advocate for, like, patience. I mean, I think one of the—one of the challenging things is, you know, Charlie Kirk’s assassination happens less than two hours ago, and you already have people who are speculating about cause, and about motive, and perpetrator, and the perpetrator’s sexual identity. When, in reality, it was going to—always going to take days for that to come out. And one of the advantages we have this time, frankly, is the perpetrator survived. And we’re going to have a trial.
It was very upsetting, I think, to a lot of people that after the Trump assassination attempt we didn’t have a trial. That person died on scene. And so all those answers—all those questions that we all had for why, they never got answered. And so that story kind of just died away. That we were never able to really get to the bottom of it. That’s probably not going to be the case this time. So there’s no need to be sat, you know, on Twitter or Bluesky on the night that Charlie Kirk is assassinated, and fight with people about what the motive was. Because none of us knew. And the reality is, this time we’re going to get a trial. This individual is going to get plenty of opportunities to share his motive. And we’ll be able to make assessments and analyses off of that. But I think patience and not turning an event like this horrific assassination into spectator sport, into something to cheer on or lose, like you’re in a sports match, would be advantageous.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m taking the next question from Allison Hughes, who’s a first-year student at Culver-Stockton College: With the rise in political violence and intolerance, what do you believe should be the next step in preventing more of the youth from following in the footsteps of those who believe this violence to be their only option? What can we do to prevent this ideology from growing more popular and inspiring more violence?
HOFFMAN: Well, this we have to hear from the younger coauthor of the book. (Laughs.)
WARE: Yeah, I—first of all, Allison, thank you so much for the great question. I have bad news for you on the—on the youth question. I’ll tell you exactly what I tell my students at Georgetown, which is I’m too old to be able to answer that question. Something has happened with youth culture in the social media era far beyond anything I can understand. I mean, Bruce kind of alluded to some of those things with some of the memes that were shared on the bullet casings, which are totally bizarre.
My personal view, frankly, is in this kind of very ironic, very humor-focused, fast moving, chaotic online landscape, older counterterrorism professionals can’t even speak the language, let alone come up with prevention ideas. I actually think young people need to be engaging in this space on their own, thinking about what it means to build environments that are healthier, more tolerant. Of course, we will advocate for changes to social media companies. We would advocate for algorithm reform. Bruce and I have written about reform to something called Section 230, to try to force social media companies to be more liable for their content. But we’ve run into brick walls on that. And I think at some point we have to think about cultural shifts in helping young people to protect each other.
Let me quickly comment on that other shooting I mentioned earlier, the shooting that day, last Wednesday, at Evergreen High School, by an individual who was obviously a school shooter, but also seemingly inspired by nihilistic violent extremism, white supremacy, and incel ideology. He apparently, according to the Anti-Defamation League, had been spending his time on a website called Watch People Die, and had also been a part of what’s called a true crime community, which is individuals who basically lionize and worship school shooters.
I don’t know the state of mind that drives a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old to be in those networks, to be in a place where that’s how they want to spend their time. I think the only way to get them out is either through that prevention work, to try to protect young people and protect their vulnerabilities, but also just having young people build networks, build institutions that protect the weakest and most vulnerable and most isolated among them. That’s all I can offer.
HOFFMAN: Great question, Allison.
FASKIANOS: Great. We have a raised hand from Charlie P—maybe Charles Pasquale?
Q: Yes, that’s correct.
FASKIANOS: OK, great.
Q: Yeah, this is Charlie Pasquale. I’m a CFR member.
And just want to ask that, given the Second Amendment’s emphasis on a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state is a common bulwark against gun control. So in this sense, gun access is inseparable from the concept of a militia. And my question is about responsibility, or the lack of it. There’s often talk about gun manufacturers or dealers being responsible, but there’s little about state governors’ responsibility for both official and unofficial militias. So if keeping and bearing arms are directly linked to militias, and governors are responsible for the regulation of militias in their states, how do you see that aspect as being either maybe ignored or maybe a potential lever to help shift the debate, and maybe focus some more responsibility that could drive action?
HOFFMAN: Well, there’s only one regulated militia in state law. That’s the National Guard. I mean all these other militias—in fact, Charlie, just as your very prescient question illuminates—I mean, they’re illegal. And Mary McCord, a former Department of Justice senior official, has been arguing this for years, that the way to counter not just the proliferation of guns, but paramilitary training that gives people the wherewithal, the skillsets, or the encouragement, perhaps, or the inspiration to engage in this violence, is precisely by targeting illegal militia—militias that are patently illegal, even under state law.
But lamentably, even despite Mary’s urging, even despite the logic—the compelling logic of that argument, we don’t see very much movement. And I think that in certain states, for example, this would be political suicide for those elected representatives. And therefore, it’s an enormously, I think, important and attractive policy remedy, but it’s one that, lamentably, at least to my knowledge—maybe Jacob knows differently—has not been utilized to the extent that it should.
WARE: No further comments, Bruce. That’s a great question for Mary McCord though, indeed.
FASKIANOS: Great. You all can raise your hand, too.
So I’ll continue reading questions. From Damon Hamman, who’s a graduate student at the NYU School of Professional Studies in transnational security: How do we see these domestic groups, far-right and Islamist, as well as transnational groups linked to organized crime? Do they share similarities, resources, or strategic planning and execution strategies? If so, what are some of the ways they operate together?
WARE: I’ll take a stab at it, and I’ll let Bruce focus more on the organized crime element. I would just point out, typically—and, of course, this is the kind of famous last words that a counterterrorism researcher, you know, says and then gets proven wrong. But typically, the predominant concern in the United States is not from groups. When you go down the trajectory of violence that we’ve seen in this country—I mentioned some of them earlier, Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso Buffalo, et cetera, of course, now the assassination of Charlie Kirk—we’re looking at lone actors. And that is something that is a trend around the world. It’s something that’s a trend across ideologies. You do see levels of organization in all extremist movements, but a lot of these networks, a lot of these movements, ideologies, have figured out that actually the best way to conduct their activities, the best way to go unnoticed, the best way to ultimately arrive at a location when you can successfully conduct an act of terrorism, is to act alone.
As always, there was plenty of noise. There is still plenty of noise around the Charlie Kirk assassin, of whether he was part of an organized group, about whether people had forewarning. I would just say, you know, based on my experience, based on the patterns, and basically any other terrorist incident that occurs in the United States these days, I would be very surprised if this was not a case of lone actor terrorism. Because that’s just the model. And it works. And typically, these individuals, they don’t need a lot of organizational capacity. They don’t need money. They don’t need a lot of training. They’re able to conduct attacks on their own. And so the organized groups—I mean, Bruce might have some thoughts on the overlap with organized crime—but typically groups these days are relatively irrelevant in these spaces. And that is certainly true with the network that Bruce mentioned earlier, the nihilist violent extremists.
HOFFMAN: I would only add that, you know, organized criminal gangs or apolitical criminals, I mean, they’re about making money. And they use violence to facilitate making—about making money illicitly, I should say, or illegally. And they use violence to facilitate that process. They’re not about changing the political system. They’re not about making a statement about society. They’re not about expressing their opprobrium to a particular policy or elected official. And that has, at least historically, acted as something of a firewall, where criminals avoid their politically motivated counterparts because they see it as only focusing more attention on criminal activities and therefore undermining what is the stock and trade of criminal groups, which is making money illegally.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
We have a raised hand from Sauda Habib Salim.
Q: Yeah. Thank you.
I think my question is around the deprioritization of counterterrorism in the American context, I was just wondering if this is purely from a utilitarian perspective, given that the magnitude of losses from terrorist activities isn’t as high as other structural complications—say, from illegal immigration. And maybe it’s a two-part question, thinking through what amount of damage must terrorism cause for it to trigger our federal government’s attention? Thank you.
FASKIANOS: And what’s your affiliation?
Q: Tsinghua University.
WARE: Bruce? I think that’s such a great question. I’m dying to hear what you have to say. I’ll just say really quickly, I don’t know what the threshold is. I do know this. Terrorism has a very strong agenda-setting function. I might be quoting Bruce Hoffman and Inside Terrorism directly there, and I apologize, Bruce. But I think you saw that last week. Last week’s incident in Utah, we are talking about one fatality. How many—how many fatalities do we have from regular gun violence every day? How many drug—how many fatalities do we have in car crashes, drug overdoses? We’re talking about one fatality in an act of terrorism, an assassination, and it has the ability to completely shut down the newswire for a week. That is terrorism’s unique power.
And I’m on board with the idea that this is—that it’s—that reducing counterterrorism because it has less utility is the way that we should move forward. But then I think we need to have some kind of preparation to deal better when these incidents happen, and do so in a more measured and reasonable way. Otherwise, we have to fight back and we have to devote resources to it because as you see incidents like what happened last Wednesday, and what they mean for that person, his family—not just for that person and his family, but also what it means for our country, it is pretty devastating, pretty catastrophic. And that’s why you devote resources to it.
HOFFMAN: Terrorism existed for 2,000 years. And I think the reason it’s existed is because it does have this outsized effect that’s divorced from the reality of the terrorist who can commit a heinous violent act, but at the end of the day it’s not going to bring down a government. Although there are—historically, there are examples where terrorism has had a profound strategic impact. I mean the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne in 2014 (sic; 1914) set in motion the First World War. The 9/11 attacks, of course, set in motion the first world war of the twenty-first century, although fortunately that’s relatively rare.
In responding to your question, what struck—and it’s a very good question—what struck me the most is that historically in America we prefer to see terrorism as something that’s foreign, that’s external, that’s imported into this country. And this goes through the history of the United States. It is tied in with some of our xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, at times. But we see terrorism as something that’s imported to the United States, and we constantly avert our eyes to domestic terrorism. I mean, appropriately, we just marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And that was—you know, I mean, over the past two decades, the immediacy of it has eroded, and therefore perhaps the amount of activity or the intensity of the commemorations have diminished somewhat. But we still appreciate it and mark it.
But until 9/11, the single most consequential terrorist incident in the United States, and certainly the most lethal one, was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. And for all intents and purposes, it’s pretty much forgotten. I mean, there’s some attention paid to it. But we’re, I think, fundamentally disquieted, even today, when Americans kill fellow Americans. And rather than coming to grips and really probing as deeply as—all the questions have indicated—probing as deeply into the why and how we could avert it in the future, most often the response is either very broad-brush solutions that come from a politicized base, or else to ignore the problem altogether.
WARE: Really quickly, I’ll just—I’ll just jump back in there, Bruce, and say one thing. People love asking terrorism researchers, like, is terrorism an existential threat? And I’ve always answered that question the same way. I’ve said, no, terrorism is not an existential threat. In other words, there is no kind of level of violence, there is no number of fatalities that can cause a state to collapse. The way that it’s existential is the way that governments respond. And obviously there’s been a lot of research about the response of the U.S. government after 9/11, not just abroad but here at home.
And I would say, that question is certainly relevant with some—a minority, but some—of the statements that have come out of the Trump administration after this assassination. For example, one prominent figure of the administration is saying that the Democratic Party is a terrorist organization. That kind of language, if they were to act on it, that would obviously certainly be existential to the United States as a democracy. We’re not at that point, I don’t believe. You know, if we do get there, you know, I would change my answer. But really great question. Thank you.
FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to a question from Jonas Doherty, who’s a sophomore and homeland security major at University of New Hampshire, Manchester: What do you think comes next on the front of domestic extremism in the United States? Do you think it will be more assassinations or another form of violence?
And I’m going to combine that with a question from Vance Gray, who’s at the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology: Why call it assassination and not just “killed” or “lost life”? People are killed or lose their life each day. And how do we teach this in our classes? So why label it assassination versus something else, and how do we talk about it?
HOFFMAN: I’ll jump in. I’ll take the second question first, and then back into the first question.
We call it “assassination” the same way we label something “terrorism.” And assassination can be a tactic of terrorism. Because it has a political motive. It’s not a murder that’s carried out because of greed, because of jealousy, because of some theft, criminal intent. It’s something that is designed to send a political message, that is designed to communicate a violent message beyond the victim, or beyond the target, to a target audience. And therefore, it’s a different kind of murder. You could say politically motivated homicide is, to me, synonymous with assassination. And it’s one of the many tactics that we see in terrorism. And terrorism is violence that always has a political motive.
In terms of looking towards the future, well, just—and I’m not making an editorial comment on the Second Amendment one way or the other—but there is a profound availability of firearms in the United States that means that violently inclined individuals, especially if they’re influenced over social media, don’t have to reach very far to pick up a handgun or a rifle. And in the case of Tyler Robinson, for example, it was a hunting rifle that was given to him as a gift by his parents. And Jacob and I have, you know, focused on the dominant trend, which is the lone actor. But let me go back to Oklahoma City. I mean, Timothy McVeigh acted pretty much alone. I mean, he had—a former Army buddy was one of his confederates. But he acted alone. And he used a bomb, not a gun, and killed 168 people.
And that’s one thing that worries me, is that in an environment where we see a trajectory where violence on an individual basis is becoming more common—the assassinations—what I am holding my breath about is if someone doesn’t cross that line and decide to go even further than using a firearm, and using some other act—some other tactic or some other weapon—that will cause even more casualties. You know, the perverse vicariousness that attended the footage of Charlie Kirk being assassinated, that went viral, is, you know, very worrisome. I mean, there are people out there that look at that and see—in fact, because of the confluence of gaming and terrorism—see scoring points by engaging in homicide and destruction as something desirable. So that’s what I worry about in the future, is even higher levels of violence and different types of weapons being involved.
WARE: I’ll just add a note on Jonas’s question, which is excellent. You know, I view the domestic terrorism landscape today as quite chaotic, and confused, and unpredictable. I think, and Bruce can certainly correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think there were probably moments in our history where you could have said confidently, the next terrorist attack is going to be this ideology and this kind of attack—just because that was the trend. So maybe in the 1970s you could have said, oh, it’s going to be a left—far-left terrorist attack. In the 2000s, you would have been able to say, oh, it’s going to be a jihadist terrorist attack. I think over the past decade, you would have said, it’s going to be a white supremacist attack. Because that was the trend.
I’m not sure today that you could confidently say, tomorrow it’s most likely to be X, because I think you have multiple ideologies, multiple networks that are equally mobilized, that are equally angry, have equal access to weaponry, and are facing an equally diminished counterterrorism enterprise. And so I think the answer to your question, Jonas, is very simply it’s unpredictable. And obviously unpredictability in counterterrorism is very challenging, because we want predictability. We want dots that we can connect to try to interdict the plot. If everybody is planning, then that leaves you in a very dangerous position. And that’s when you want a really robust counterterrorism infrastructure. And we don’t have that today.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Danielle Greminger, who also has raised her hand. So she’s using your book in her class. Danielle, let’s go to you. If you can tell us what class you’re using the book in.
Q: Yes, hi. My name is Danielle Greminger. I’m currently a student at George Washington University, College of Professional Studies. And my major is homeland security.
And we’re actually currently using your book in my course. And it is Political Violence and Terrorism. And I have to write a paper on the possibility of terrorist organizations using weapons of mass destruction. And I just kind of wanted to get your input. Earlier in the class we actually defined whether terrorism was in existential threat or not. I came to the same conclusion as you guys did. But, yeah, please, if you’re able to share, what would you think the possibility of terrorist organizations—what the possibility of terrorist organizations using weapons of mass destruction actually looks like?
HOFFMAN: Well, you—in a sense, you’ve answered your own question. It’s a very good question, because you’ve said terrorist organizations that have the expertise and knowledge to research and to fabricate and then to successfully deploy or disseminate a weapon of mass destruction really is much more in the realm of an organizational structure than a lone individual. And Jacob and I have been talking a lot the past hour about lone individuals. And this is why firearms are so attractive to the lone wolf or the lone perpetrator, is they’re accessible and the skillset required to use them.
I mean, think of Thomas Crooks, who attempted to assassinate President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania eighteen months ago. As I recall, he couldn’t make his high school Gun Club, but under immense pressure with local police scaling ladders to get up onto the rooftop where he was positioned, he managed to pull off a shot that grazed President Trump in the ear, and then tragically killed another individual. So I think it’s that accessibility, and ease, and familiarity that means that, just as historically terrorist organizations as well as individual terrorists have embraced the gun and the bomb, and have very rarely attempted to employ more esoteric types of weapons because they’re unfamiliar with them, because the buy-in and then use of them is far more complicated and complex, means that we’ll continue to see terrorism that involves shooting, blowing things up, arson, and so on.
But we should never become complacent because, in an era of artificial intelligence, for example, where scientific knowledge is multiplying, that’s not to say that there might not be a terrorist group out there in the future, or even now—because we know ISIS, the Islamic State, had two different facilities in Iraq that were attempting to weaponize and develop chemical agents. Al-Qaeda a quarter of a century ago had two different facilities in Afghanistan that were competing against one another to weaponize anthrax. So we can never dismiss the WMD potentiality. But I would say, unfortunately—maybe in this case the lesser of two evils is that the stock and trade or the bread and butter of terrorists has been the gun and the bomb.
Q: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that answer.
So would you say that cybersecurity, or cyberattacks, in your opinion, would—should be more our focus than terrorists using weapons of mass destruction? Even including nuclear, biological, chemical weapons?
HOFFMAN: I think terrorists will use cyber tactics to facilitate their reconnaissance and surveillance, and enhance their operations. I mean for terrorists, like for the media, if it bleeds it leads. And you want that image of bloodshed and body bags to heighten your coercive ability. I think terrorists have also shied away from, or else abandoned, using weapons of mass destruction because it’s very difficult to be successful. And if a terrorist doesn’t succeed, they don’t terrorize anyone. So as, let’s say, politically fanatical or religiously fanatical, as well, that terrorists might be, is how operationally conservative they’ve been historically.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I want to try to sneak in one last question from Linda Kao. If you can unmute yourself, Linda. OK. All right.
We will take the next question then from Chinedu Ezeife. And this will be the last question.
Q: Yes. Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Chinedu Ezeife. I’m completing my master’s in political science from Brooklyn College. I’m actually a student of Professor Okome. And I’m also a member of the U.S. Army Reserves and aspiring security and terrorism analyst.
So my question is this. There’s been some talk of foreign actor involvement in recent terrorism incidents like the Charlie Kirk assassination. So, of course, these are unfounded. We don’t know for sure yet. But how prevalent do you think this is? And how do you think we deal with it?
WARE: Well, that’s a great question, Chinedu. First of all, thank you for your service.
Second of all, I think it depends on the states and how aggressive they are, and how much they want, you know, deniability. I haven’t seen any credible evidence in the Charlie Kirk case that there’s a foreign state involved, but the one area where we’ve seen plenty of state involvement is, of course, Iran and their efforts to assassinate Westerners in New York, here in DC, and further afield. They view that as a legitimate response to U.S. action in Iran and against Qasem Soleimani, the former general of the Quds Force. And they’re prepared to go to that level. What the reaction to that would be if they were to succeed in assassinating a U.S. person, I’m not sure.
I think in terms of Russia and China, some of those other actors, I think they’re quite content, actually, right now, to sit back and watch the division and the polarization that Russia helped sow back in 2016 with the election interference. They don’t need currently to manipulate the U.S. any further. It’s already very divided, very polarized. And we see that, of course, in the lack of a coherent response right now in Ukraine. So with that, I’ll pass it to you, Bruce, for any final thoughts.
HOFFMAN: I think that’s—I mean, this is a very important question because I think one of the hidden dangers is individuals unknowingly being manipulated by foreign influences. We’ve already seen that in Australia, for example, where in some cases criminals have been enlisted by terrorist organizations, or by designated state terrorist entities. And that, especially given the digital space that many of these lone wolves have occupied and their susceptibility to external influences, as an indirect form of warfare of course, that could be immensely attractive to any number of America’s adversaries.
FASKIANOS: Well, thank you both for this hour. We are at the end of our time. And I apologize to all of you for not being able to get through all your questions and raised hands. But we do appreciate your engagement. And Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, thank you, again, for your analysis. We appreciate it.
The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, October 1, at 1:00 p.m. (EDT). Rush Doshi, who’s a senior fellow for Asia studies here at CFR and director of the China Strategy Initiative, will talk about the China challenge. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. Visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues, and education.CFR.org for free, expert-informed teaching and learning resources. And, of course, I commend to you Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware’s book God, Guns, and Sedition. It’s now in the paperback version. So you should pick it up and read their analysis there. So, again, thank you all, and have a good rest of your day.
WARE: Thank you.
HOFFMAN: Thank you.
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