She wanted a rifle. She needed a soldier for her plan to overthrow the government.
Sarah Beth Clendaniel was a radical looking for a target when authorities say she conspired with Brandon Russell, a white supremacist who belongs to an organization known as Atomwaffen Division, to destroy the power grid around Baltimore. Clendaniel dressed in camouflage uniform. Russell called himself “Raccoon” and, according to federal agents, kept a framed photograph of Oklahoma City shooter Timothy McVeigh on his dresser.
They communicated through encrypted messages, but the authorities thwarted the mission. Clendaniel pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to damage or destroy power stations in Maryland. Russell, who was previously charged with possession of explosives, is awaiting trial. The case did not attract much attention outside of Baltimore, but it was another reminder of the danger of terrorism in an unstable nation.
The United States faces threats to its security in a presidential election year from Islamic militants, far-right extremists, left-wing radicals and a host of fanatics disaffected by the country's culture wars and our polarized society. Officials are increasingly concerned about rising currents of left- and right-wing venom rooted in anti-establishment anger and amplified by social media that are testing the government's ability to track down militants like Clendaniel and Russell.
Timothy McVeigh's hatred of the federal government led him to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 186 people and injuring hundreds more. According to federal agents, Brandon Russell, accused of plotting to blow up Baltimore's power grid, kept a photo of McVeigh on his dresser.
(Associated Press)
“The threat is not more potent than around 9/11, but it is certainly more diverse and difficult to counter,” said Colin P. Clarke, research director at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm in New York City. York. . “We're dealing with a far right, a more aggressive left, and what we call 'salad bar people,' who take a little bit of each ideology and put them together. Incels. Q-Anon. “The range of actors involved now is much broader than what we are used to.”
The race between President Biden and Donald Trump underscores the prospects for unrest and violence. Republican senators have asked the Secret Service to keep protesters further away from the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. Protesters are also expected to flock to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where in 1968, during an era of intense unrest over the Vietnam War that some suggest parallels to today's political tremors, police beat and gassed tear gas to hundreds of protesters.
On a visit to Chicago this month, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle met with nearly 100 agents who will protect both conventions. She told CNN that she was concerned about a number of threats, including “the lone gunman.”
“There are people who are radicalized. You have manifestations that can arise. And obviously we hope they remain peaceful here, but they could become violent,” he said.
Most violence and “other threat indicators” [are] from groups that lean more conservative,” said Amy Cooter, a terrorism expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. What is notable, she added, is that extremist narratives, particularly accelerationist ones (such as those espoused by Clendaniel that use violence to accelerate social collapse) can attract radicals from across the political spectrum.
“There is a possibility for people who have very different underlying political beliefs,” Cooter said, “to join forces on issues where they have common ground.”
Domestic militant organizations complicit in the Jan. 6 riots, including the Proud Boys, remain a danger, Cooter said, despite the arrests of their leaders and the loss of a centralized online home since Facebook blocked the groups. extremists. Before the 2020 election, Trump told the Proud Boys to “step back and stand by.” Reuters reported that after Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records, a Proud Boys chapter in Ohio vowed “war” in a statement that said, “Fighting solves everything.”
Trump's increasingly militant campaign speeches against immigrants and conspiracies about the “deep state” also resonate with other groups in the so-called patriot movement. The former president suggested in veiled language that his supporters might rebel if he was sent to prison: “I'm not sure the public would tolerate it,” he told Fox News. “You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point.”
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told CNN she was concerned about a series of threats to the United States.
(Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press)
“Not all members of the military like Trump. Some think he’s too brash, too old,” said Cooter, who spent years interviewing and researching militia groups in Michigan. “But they are very receptive to his rhetoric because he appeals to their concerns about immigration or about cultural change in other ways. Even if they are not going to vote for him, it awakens their urgency around these issues.”
The current unrest has not yet reached the magnitude of the late 1960s or 1970s, when far-left domestic terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army orchestrated dozens of attacks. Many of the threats these days come from varied agendas, including Payton Gendron, who wrote a 180-page racist rant before killing 10 black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, and James Hodgkinson, a radical leftist who in 2017 shot and wounded at least four people at a softball practice for Republican congressmen in Alexandria, Virginia.
In April, Kyran Caples, who police say became radicalized while in Fresno state and joined a shadowy anti-government group known as the Moro Sovereign Citizens, shot and seriously wounded two police officers in Florida. Caples was killed by police. In the plot to destroy Baltimore's power grid, the Justice Department quoted Clendaniel, once photographed heavily armed and wearing camouflage uniforms, a headscarf and a skull mask, as saying that an attack “would likely completely devastate and permanently this city.”
The country has been shaken by anger and unrest in recent years over the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, George Floyd protests, an insurrection at the Capitol and pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses. Those internal rifts have coincided with a rejuvenated branch of ISIS that is recruiting militants beyond its base in Afghanistan and this year carried out attacks in Russia and Iran that killed at least 220 people.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that his agency was concerned about “a rogue gallery” of foreign organizations calling for violence against Americans. But he suggested that the most pressing danger comes from individuals and small groups in the United States who “take twisted inspiration from events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home.” The agency, he said, has been “analyzing thousands of reported threats.”
(Allison Dinner/Associated Press)
He added that tensions surrounding the war between Israel and Hamas “will fuel a channel of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.” In April, Wray, describing what he called a heightened threat environment, told the House Appropriations Committee that the agency's fiscal year 2024 budget was nearly $500 million short of what it needed. “This couldn't come at a worse time,” he said. “We need people… Now is not the time to make cuts.”
That threat landscape, radiating through a broad prism of anger and ideologies, has shaped America's discourse and sharpened its divisions. The battles unfolding in Congress have run parallel to the social and political fervor around anti-Semitism, Gaza, abortion, immigration and the right to bear arms that unfolds on college campuses, statehouses, podcasts, rallies and talk shows.
“The powerful emotions that have been unleashed are not fading,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University. “Terrorism never occurs in a vacuum. It always takes advantage of the divisions, conflict and controversies that exist in the political arena and that will lead a very small group to conclude that violence is the only way” to overthrow a corrupt system.
The radicalization of youth has its roots in the generation that came of age during the isolation of the pandemic and has since seen governments powerless or indifferent to climate change, wealth gaps and the cessation of wars in Ukraine and Gaza. “This creates a bed of frustration and mistrust,” said Hoffman, co-author of “God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.” “They seek to be entertained and stimulated rather than informed and confident that they are getting accurate information. TikTok is giving them what they want.”
People pay their respects outside the scene of a supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, on May 15, 2022. Payton Gendron wrote a 180-page racist speech before killing 10 black people in the supermarket.
(Matt Rourke/Associated Press)
When testifying before the House Appropriations Committee, Wray described the threats the United States faces from terrorism, cartels trafficking fentanyl, and cyberattacks on businesses and infrastructure.
“Looking back on my career in law enforcement,” he said, “I would be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many threats to our public and national security were so elevated at the same time.”
