President Joe Biden on Saturday called white supremacy the “most dangerous terrorist threat” faced by the United States today — one week after eight people were killed by a shooter in Allen who sympathized with the ideology in social-media posts.
Speaking during the commencement at Howard University, a historically Black university, Biden described white supremacy as a “poison,” recalling how he singled it, along with political extremism, out as threats to American democracy during his inaugural address.
“Silence is complicity,” Biden told the crowd.
Biden’s speech comes as the country, Texas especially, is contending with a rise in white supremacist groups and movements. The issue has been a concern throughout his first term; Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a Senate committee in 2021 that white supremacists represent the greatest domestic threat to homeland security.
The FBI has also said the greatest domestic threat comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.”
The Allen shooter appeared to leave a wide-ranging social media presence that indicated an obsession with violence and admiration for Adolf Hitler. In handwritten diary pages, he described becoming radicalized by a white supremacist during a brief stint in the Army in 2008.
Extremist groups, especially those espousing white nationalist and white supremacist ideology, are a growing threat in Texas.
The Southern Poverty Law Center said it tracked 52 hate groups in Texas in 2021, many of them espousing neo-Nazi beliefs. The center’s 2021 report on hate and extremism ranked Texas third in the nation for the number of such groups, behind California and Florida.
In a report earlier this year, the Anti-Defamation League said Texas led the nation in the distribution of white supremacist propaganda.
