CONFRONTING VIOLENT WHITE SUPREMACY

(PART III):
ADDRESSING THE TRANSNATIONAL
TERRORIST THREAT

JOINT HEARING
BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY

AND THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL

LIBERTIES
OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND

REFORM
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION

SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

Serial No. 116–63

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform

(
Available on: http://www.govinfo.gov
http://www.oversight.house.gov or
http://www.docs.house.gov

U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

37–975 PDF WASHINGTON : 2019
 COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, Acting Chairwoman
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Ranking Minority Member
Columbia PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky
JIM COOPER, Tennessee MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia JODY B. HICE, Georgia
RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI, Illinois GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin
JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland JAMES COMER, Kentucky
HARLEY ROUDA, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
KATIE HILL, California BOB GIBBS, Ohio
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana
PETER WELCH, Vermont CHIP ROY, Texas
JACKIE SPEIER, California CAROL D. MILLER, West Virginia
ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois MARK E. GREEN, Tennessee
MARK DESAULNIER, California KELLY ARMSTRONG, North Dakota
BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan W. GREGORY STEUBE, Florida
STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands FRANK KELLER, Pennsylvania
RO KHANNA, California
JIMMY GOMEZ, California
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York
AYANNA PRESSLEY, Massachusetts
RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan

DAVID RAPALLO, Staff Director

CANDYCE PHOENIX, Minority Staff Director
DAN REBNORD, Staff Director
AMY STRATTON, Clerk
CHRISTOPHER HIXON, Minority Staff Director
CONTACT NUMBER: 202-225-5051

(II)
 SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts, Chairman
JIM COOPER, Tennesse JODY B. HICE, Georgia, Ranking Minority
PETER WELCH, Vermont Member
HARLEY ROUDA, California PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina
MARK DESAULNIER, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands MARK E. GREEN, Tennessee
BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan CLAY HIGGINS, Louisiana

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland, Chairman
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri CHIP ROY, Texas, Ranking Minority Member
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky
ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina
JIMMY GOMEZ, California JODY B. HICE, Georgia
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
AYANNA PRESSLEY, Massachusetts CAROL D. MILLER, West Virginia
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of FRED KELLER, Pennsylvania
Columbia

(III)
 C O N T E N T S

Page
Hearing held on September 20, 2019 ..................................................................... 1

WITNESSES
Dr. Kathleen Belew, Research Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in Behav-
ioral Sciences, Stanford University
Oral Statement ........................................................................................................ 6
Dr. Joshua Geltzer, Director, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Pro-
tection, Georgetown Law
Oral Statement ........................................................................................................ 8
Ms. Katrina Mulligan, Managing Director, National Security and Inter-
national Policy, Center for American Progress
Oral Statement ........................................................................................................ 10
Ms. Candace Owens, Founder, Blexit, Host, Candace Owens Show
Oral Statement ........................................................................................................ 12

INDEX OF DOCUMENTS

The documents listed below are available at: https://docs.house.gov.

* Unanimous Consent: National Review article, ″How to Combat White
Supremacist Gun Violence While Protecting the Second Amendment; sub-
mitted by Rep. Roy.

(IV)
 CONFRONTING VIOLENT WHITE SUPREMACY
(PART III):
ADDRESSING THE TRANSNATIONAL
TERRORIST THREAT
Friday, September 20, 2019

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
SUBCOMMITTEEON NATIONAL SECURITY, JOINT WITH
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES,
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittees met, pursuant to notice, at 9:11 a.m., in room
2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jamie Raskin [chair-
man of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties] pre-
siding.
Present: Representatives Raskin, Lynch, Maloney, Clay, Welch,
Wasserman Schultz, Rouda, Kelly, Plaskett, Pressley, Norton, Roy,
Hice, Meadows, Green, Higgins, and Jordan (ex officio).
Mr. RASKIN. The subcommittee will come to order. Good morning,
everyone. Without objection, the chair’s authorized to declare a re-
cess of the committee at any time. This joint hearing of the Na-
tional Security and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittees
is entitled, ‘‘Confronting Violent White Supremacy (Part III): Ad-
dressing the Transnational Terrorist Threat.’’ I am delighted to be
joined by Mr. Lynch, who is the chair of the National Security Sub-
committee, and I will turn it over to him for his opening statement.
Mr. LYNCH. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and to the
ranking member. Good morning. I want to thank the chairman for
calling this hearing, and I also want to thank our witnesses for
your willingness to help the committee with its work. Unfortu-
nately, with scheduling, I have to say in advance, that I have a
competing committee just down the hall that’s having roll call votes
on a markup, so I’m going to have to depart and then come back,
but I will be present for most of the hearing.
Today, we will discuss the urgent need for the United States to
treat white supremacist violence as a transnational terrorist threat
to our national security. As Chairman Raskin will detail in his
opening statement, far right nationalist ideologies are spreading
and reverberating across the world. In recent years, we’ve seen
white supremacists increasingly resorting to the use of violence to
achieve their ideological objectives. And today, for the first time
since September 11, 2001, more people have been killed in racially
motivated or right-wing terrorist incidents in the United States
than in attacks perpetrated by Islamic extremists.
This brings me to an important distinction that we must make
absolutely clear when framing the parameters of today’s hearing:
(1)
 2

Not all right-wing extremists, white supremacists, or white nation-

alists are terrorists. The First Amendment grants Americans the
freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly found
that political or ideological speech requires the highest level of pro-
tection, even if the content of that speech is abhorrent, or contrary
to American values.
However, the point at which violence is used or suggested, or
threatened, to advance those political objectives, is the threshold at
which counterterrorism and law enforcement officials must be em-
powered to intervene in order to maintain the peace and to save
lives.
This is a difficult task that requires striking a delicate balance,
but it is a challenge the U.S. Government became intimately famil-
iar with in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Many Amer-
icans will recall that as the United States exerted overwhelming
military and counterterrorism pressure on Al-Qaeda, and later, the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. These terrorist organizations in-
creasingly turn to homegrown violent extremists to carry out ter-
rorist attacks without specific direction or financial support from
their organizational leadership.
These homegrown violent extremists often radicalized on the
internet, sometimes in virtual chat rooms with other sympathizers,
creating an ideological echo chamber that would ultimately inspire
them to carry out acts of terrorism in pursuit of their political ob-
jectives. White supremacists and right-wing terrorists have taken
a page from the jihadi playbook. Today, right-wing extremists are
radicalizing on the internet, absorbing hate-filled propaganda on
sites like the Daily Stormer, and in digital chat rooms, such as
Achan.
There, they find common ideological cause with other white su-
premacists, and are sometimes moved to take violent action. This
latest wave of white supremacist terrorism thus closely resembles
that of the jihadi homegrown violent extremists as both lack ex-
plicit direction or financial support from a fixed, specific terrorist
organization, thereby making it exceedingly challenging for
counterterrorism and law enforcement officials to collect intel-
ligence on potential plots, terrorist networks, and attackers.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of September 11, the U.S. intel-
ligence community and national security agencies, as well as those
of our allies and partners, mobilized to address the global jihadi
terrorist threat.
In 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist
Prevention Act, which created the office of the Director of National
Intelligence, to lead the U.S. intelligence community, as well as the
National Counterterrorism Center, to analyze and integrate ter-
rorist-related intelligence and to conduct strategic operational plan-
ning for U.S. counterterrorism activities.
In the fall of 2014, the United States created a global coalition
to counter ISIS, which today includes 81 countries and inter-
national organizations to improve information sharing and to
counter ISIS financing and propaganda. Most recently, in Decem-
ber 2017, the United States Security Council—excuse me—the
United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2396, which re-
 3

quires U.N. States to develop watch lists or data bases of known

or suspected terrorists, including foreign fighters.
We need to start treating violent white supremacy with the same
urgency as we do violent Islamic extremism, and with the whole-
of-government approach. Unfortunately, for too long, U.S. counter-
terrorism efforts had focused almost exclusively on the jihadi ter-
rorist threat, and I look forward to today’s hearing to discuss how
best the U.S. should address the growing threat of white nation-
alist terrorism.
Mr. Chairman, thank you again for your courtesy and for holding
this hearing.
I yield back.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks
for that splendid opening statement. I turn now to the ranking
member, Mr. Roy of Texas.
Mr. ROY. I thank the chairman, and appreciate all the witnesses
for being here today for this important topic. We’ve had a number
of hearings on this, and I know that we got some votes this morn-
ing that may be taken up—I don’t intend to make a long opening
statement, but I do want to make a couple of points because these
are important issues.
I do think it is important for us to keep in mind, you know, the
perspective here of what we’re dealing with and the overall context
of crime in our Nation. I’ve talked about that before, as the chair-
man knows. The number of murders, 17,000 murders in the United
States, and kind of looking at the root of that, and then how many
of these murders are focused on this particular problem.
I think if you put that in context, right, we’ve got a lot of issues
we need to deal with. And importantly here, you know, one of my
good friends is a guy named Andy McCarthy, who many of you
probably know, was a prosecutor who prosecuted the World Trade
Center bombings in New York in 1993 as one of the assistant U.S.
attorneys there in New York, and the Southern District of New
York. Andy has a piece in National Review that was dated, let me
see here, August 5, 2019, in which he suggests, and I think it
would be a good potential future hearing, he suggests that one of
the problems that we face right now is that we don’t have the kind
of focus on ideology-based crimes in the Department of Justice. His
contention is, is that under the Obama Administration, the Obama
Department of Justice, we backed away from sort of anti-jihad
crimes, and in doing so, we kind of backed away from focusing on
ideology.
So, as a former Federal prosecutor, I look through the lens of, I
don’t care where somebody comes from, what their race is, what
their background is, anything else, I want to go find the bad guys,
and I want to make sure that the Department of Justice and the
FBI have the tools to go find the bad guys, regardless of persua-
sion, but at the end of the day, making sure we got a targeted ef-
fort to do that so I would ask that Andy’s article be put in the
record because I think he raises an important point, and I think
it would be something we should focus on in the future if we could
have a hearing along those lines and, you know, his point is just
saying——
Mr. RASKIN. Without objection. What’s the name of the article?
 4

Mr. ROY. Oh, sorry. That would be helpful, would it not? ‘‘How
to Combat White Supremacist Gun Violence While Protecting the
Second Amendment.’’
Mr. RASKIN. Without objection.
Mr. ROY. And I think it’s an important point for the conversa-
tion, and I think at this point, I’ll just move on and turn it over
to you, Mr. Chairman. I just think it would be something to put
in the record. Thanks.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much for your opening statement,
Mr. Roy. And now, I will present mine.
Good morning to everyone. Welcome to all of our witnesses.
Thank you for being part of this. Welcome to all of our honored
guests out there and members of the committee who got up bright
and early this morning to join us. Welcome to the third in a series
of hearings that our Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Lib-
erties is conducting on the problem of confronting violent white su-
premacy. I’m delighted that we’re holding this one with the Na-
tional Security Subcommittee, and the question of how to reconcile
political liberty with public safety is one that we’ve dealt with for
a long time, and I look forward to the contributions of the National
Security Subcommittee, the discussion.
I should also say that there is parallel work going on in the
Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterter-
rorism, and I’ve benefited from the thoughts of Congressman Rose,
who’s the chair of that subcommittee.
Look, the problem of violent white supremacy in America is obvi-
ously not newly minted, it is the Nation’s original sin, and its
forms have changed over the years. In recent years, we’ve seen the
convergence of traditional violent racism with a global terror net-
work that poses a clear and present threat to free societies all over
the world.
White supremacy’s been a part of the American story since the
Nation’s founding, of course. In our prior hearings, we’ve recited
the list of U.S. cities and towns that have been recently trauma-
tized by white supremacist terror—Charleston, Charlottesville,
Pittsburgh, and Poway, and so on.
In August, a gunman motivated by hatred of Latinos, murdered
22 people with an assault weapon at an El Paso, Texas Walmart.
Here’s a map of white supremacist attacks between 2011–2017.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in such attacks
around the world and a deepening of the relationship between the
perpetrators of those attacks and the perpetrators of those taking
place in other countries.
The El Paso gunman’s manifesto exemplifies the intricate new
web of global white supremacy. The manifesto celebrated another
infamous white supremacist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand,
where a gunman, loaded up on race hate, assassinated 51 people
at two mosques earlier this year.
The Christchurch killings inspired the murder in Poway. The
Christchurch shooter himself took inspiration from racist mass
murderers in Charleston, in London, in Quebec City, and in Swe-
den. Most recent perpetrators of white supremacist violence cite as
inspiration the 2011 attack in Oslo, Norway, which killed 77 peo-
ple, many of them children.
 5

Indeed, since 2011, at least one-third of white supremacist at-

tacks have been modeled on an earlier deadly attack somewhere
else in the world. The manifestos and tactics reveal that these are
not isolated episodes. To the contrary, these incidents of spectac-
ular violence are committed by embittered men who self-radicalize
online, and see themselves as participating in the launch of a glob-
al race war.
They believe the wrong side won in World War II, and they are
determined to resurrect Nazism and to bring genocide. The specific
ideology unifying this transnational movement is known as the
great replacement. Adherence to this philosophy claimed that a so-
called white genocide is being perpetrated by nonwhite people. This
was the meaning of white supremacists in Charlottesville chanting,
‘‘You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.’’
This paranoia is the common thread uniting these attacks moti-
vated by hatred of immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and other
nonwhite, Christian people. The rise of the internet has allowed
this ideology to spread like wildfire today, and as it spreads, blood-
shed is following in its wake.
Another key philosophical link is that of acceleration, the notion
that the quickest way to ensure the preservation of the white race
is to spark a war by committing mass murder. Manifestos from
around the world, including the El Paso and Christchurch mas-
sacres, make clear that the concept of acceleration is inspiring
many to kill.
The Trump administration has completely failed to recognize the
threat that violent white supremacists pose to our public safety
and to national security, and it must realign our counterterrorism
strategy to confront this reality. After the savage attacks of 9/11 in
2001, our national security apparatus refashioned itself into a ro-
bust counterterror framework focused on Al-Qaeda, but as quick as
we were to recognize the threat of violent Islamic extremism, we’ve
been correspondingly slow to recognize the threat of global violent
white supremacy.
The results have been unsurprising. Testimony before this sub-
committee in May established that from 9/11/2001 until today, 71
percent of violent Islamist inspired extremists in the United States
were stopped in the terror planning phase, but with far-right ex-
tremists, the inverse is the case, and over 70 percent managed to
successfully commit violent acts.
Our failure to properly allocate resources to target racial terror
is costing lives. Our prior hearings have called both the FBI and
DHS to task for failing to develop a plan to address white suprem-
acy, and I worry that recent developments have demonstrated that
neither agency has successfully pivoted to face this threat.
In August, we learned from late 2018 FBI documents that the
FBI considered black identity extremists to be as high a priority as
white supremacy extremists, but there’s no data to support the
FBI’s baffling threat categorizations; indeed, quite the opposite.
FBI Director Wray testified earlier this year that the vast majority
of racially motivated violent attacks in this country are committed
by white supremacists.
Furthermore, before this very subcommittee, DHS vowed to have
a strategic plan to address white supremacy by the summer’s end.
 6

Late last night, after repeated inquiries from our committee, we

learned that DHS is finally planning to release a strategy at some
point today. It is long past due, and I hope it reflects the serious-
ness and the magnitude of the threat. In addition to the FBI and
DHS, other national security agencies, like the National Counter-
terrorism Center, must treat transnational white supremacy as a
global national security threat. This is what it is.
In rising to the challenge of the moment, we obviously must not
trade our civil liberties for our security, and we must ensure that
we are leveraging our current law enforcement tools before rushing
to create new ones. In the wake of the El Paso massacre, there has
been a call for a domestic terror statute that would put domestic
terror on the same legal footing as international terror. That de-
bate is an important and a complicated one. It is not our focus
today.
Instead, we are here to discuss whether and how existing
counterterrorism tools can be effectively mobilized to address the
problem of white supremacy, and if so, what civil liberties protec-
tions will limit the potential for any overreach.
I thank Mr. Roy and Mr. Lynch and Mr. Lynch for the partner-
ship of his subcommittee on this issue. I look forward to a lively
conversation today on addressing the serious new terror threat of
global violent white supremacy.
With that, I’m delighted to—let’s see—and I should say that Mr.
Hice is not here right now so we will proceed directly to witness
testimony. I welcome the witnesses. We are joined today by Dr.
Kathleen Belew, who’s a research fellow at the Center for Ad-
vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; Dr. Joshua
Geltzer, who’s the Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advo-
cacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School; Katrina Mulligan,
the managing director of the National Security International Policy
Program at the Center for American Progress; and Candace Owens,
who’s the minority witness, who’s the founder of Blexit and the
host of the Candace Owens show.
I’m going to ask all of the witnesses to please rise and raise your
right hand if you would. Do you swear or affirm the testimony you
are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, so help you God? Let the record show that the witnesses all
answered in the affirmative. Thank you. Please be seated. The
microphones are sensitive, so please speak directly into them as
you go. Without objection, your written statements will be made
part of the record, and with that, Dr. Belew, you are now recog-
nized to give an oral presentation of your testimony for five min-
utes.
STATEMENT OF DR. KATHLEEN BELEW, ASSISTANT PRO-
FESSOR OF U.S. HISTORY AND THE COLLEGE, THE UNIVER-
SITY OF CHICAGO
Ms. BELEW. Thank you. As one of the only scholars who has
studied this troubling phenomenon deeply, and who has historical
knowledge of its patterns and drivers as well as the gaps in our
knowledge, I hope I can be of use in helping you understand this
threat, and how it might be effectively contained. This is a dark
and troubling history that leads to grave concern about the present
 7

moment, but also gives us reason to hope we’ll be able to find solu-
tions. I have spent more than a decade studying the white power
movement from its formation after the Vietnam War to the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing and into the present. This movement con-
nected Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Skinheads, radical tax protesters, mi-
litia members, and others. It brought together people in every re-
gion of the country. It joined people in suburbs and cities and on
mountain tops. It joined men, women, and children; felons and reli-
gious leaders; high school dropouts and aerospace engineers, civil-
ians and veterans and active duty troops.
It was a social movement that included a variety of strategies for
bringing about social change, both violent and nonviolent; however,
its most significant legacies have evolved from a 1983 revolutionary
turn when it declared war against the Federal Government and ra-
cial and other enemies. The first of these strategies is the use of
computer-based social network activism, which began in this move-
ment in 1984, and has only amplified in the present. The second
is an operational strategy called leaderless resistance, also from
1983–1984. This is most easily understood today as cell-style ter-
rorism meant to bring about race war in which a network of small
cells and activists could work in concert toward a commonly shared
goal with no communication with one another and with no direct
ties to movement leadership.
Now, this was designed to foil prosecution, but leaderless resist-
ance has had a much more catastrophic impact in clouding public
understanding of white power as a social movement. It’s allowed
the movement to disappear, making the violence these activists
commit seem to be the work of quote/unquote, ‘‘lone wolf actors and
errant madmen.’’ Those kinds of designations leave very little room
for enacting policy beyond mental health initiatives which will not
address the scope of this problem.
Indeed, understanding these acts of violence as politically moti-
vated, connected, and purposeful represents a crucial first step to-
ward a different response. The white power movement was and is
a transnational movement characterized by the movement of ideas,
people, weapons, money, and violent action across national bound-
aries. Furthermore, this is a movement that is dedicated to the vio-
lent overthrow of the United States. This is not just overzealous
patriotism or the claim that whiteness should be integral to the
American Nation or the American character.
Indeed, after 1983, white nationalism in the United States is not
interested in the United States when it talks about the Nation, but
rather, the Aryan Nation. It hopes to unite white people around the
world in a violent conquest of people of color. The interests of white
nationalism were and are profoundly opposed to those of the
United States. It is furthermore critical to understand the acts of
mass violence carried out by this movement were not meant as end
points in and of themselves, but were, instead, meant to awaken
other activists to join in race war. They also represent more than
individual crimes in an aggregate crime rate, because these actions
worked not only to impact individuals, but to terrorize entire tar-
geted communities.
Despite this clear and present danger to American civilians, at
no point in our history has there been a meaningful stop to white
 8

power organizing. Even in the wake of the Oklahoma City bomb-

ing, which was a white power plot and the largest deliberate Amer-
ican mass casualty between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, there was no
durable shift in public understanding, no major prosecution that
hobbled the movement.
We have utterly failed to understand what this is or how to con-
tain it. I can detail several attempts to do so by various entities,
but the historical archive does offer us another possible response,
which is truth and reconciliation projects that allow local commu-
nities to discuss racial tensions, identify areas of discord, and pro-
pose alternative interpretations of history and social inequality and
more. Truly grappling with white power violence would involve a
long look at the racial inequality foundational to many American
communities.
However, such a process could not hope to succeed in the absence
of real changes to our surveillance of white power activity and the
prosecution of domestic terrorism. Because white power activity re-
lies on fundamental misunderstandings at every level, ranging
from the individual to the media to the courts to the law, the re-
sponse would have to be broad and multifaceted. An interagency
collaboration could address the many scales, including the global,
at which white power violence currently operates. I find great hope
in our conversation about violent domestic terror now under way
in these chambers and in our Nation and I hope to be of service
in resolving this. Thank you.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Dr. Belew.
Dr. Geltzer, you’re now recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF DR. JOSHUA A. GELTZER, DIRECTOR, INSTI-
TUTE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL ADVOCACY AND PROTECTION,
ON BEHALF OF GEORGETOWN LAW
Mr. GELTZER. Thank you, Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member
Roy, distinguished members of the subcommittees. Thank you for
this opportunity to address the threat posed by violent white su-
premacy. We are here to discuss a new type of transnational ter-
rorist threat that’s posed by violent white supremacists, but it’s
helpful to begin by considering a familiar type, that posed by
jihadists, like ISIS. Consider an astonishing achievement by ISIS,
forging a transnational community of followers, and how white su-
premacists are emulating it. ISIS drew on its claim to have estab-
lished a physical caliphate to build, largely through the internet,
a global following. ISIS preyed on those vulnerable and detached
from their communities by offering them the false promise of some-
thing bigger: ISIS’s global community.
Violent white supremacists are now doing something similar.
They have used the same modern technologies ISIS exploited to
create their own global community. And they’ve similarly done so
with deadly consequences. There are key lessons we must learn
from fighting one type of transnational terrorist threat and apply
to this new type. The first, know thy enemy. The enemy Americans
are seeing from Pittsburgh to El Paso has long been characterized
in the United States as domestic terrorism, but that term has be-
come largely outdated. The violence Americans are experiencing,
like the ideology underlying it, is not really domestic any way; it’s
 9

transnational. Consider, as Chairman Raskin indicated before, this

sequence: Brenton Tarrant, the Australian, who killed 51 mosque
worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, who cited as ideological
inspiration the Norwegian, Anders Breivik, who killed 77 in 2011,
as well as the American, Dylann Roof who killed nine in 2015.
Tarrant was not a purely domestic terrorist of Australia or of New
Zealand, he was inspired by a global movement of racially moti-
vated violence.
Then look at American Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter. Be-
fore his attack, Crusius announced online, in general, I support the
Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. Then came Norwegian
Philip Manshaus, who would have killed mosque worshippers in a
city west of Oslo had he not been stopped by them. His online post-
ing praised both Tarrant and Crusius. This simply is not terrorism
domestic to any one nation alone. It’s a global surge in violence in-
spired by white supremacy. And it’s not only that the inspiration
for each new act of violence transcends national borders, it’s also
the very structure of online communication today that facilitates a
transnational network of those espousing and consuming this world
view.
Once we recognize violent white supremacy has gone global, the
importance of adopting a transnational approach to addressing the
threat becomes clear. For example, designating groups as foreign
terrorist organizations facilitates criminal prosecution of those who
provide material support to them and freezes financial accounts as-
sociated with such groups. Yet not one of the 68 entries on the
State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations is a white
supremacist group. It’s time for the U.S. Government to take a
hard look at designating foreign white supremacist groups.
Embracing the transnational approach would bring to bear an-
other asset critical to the effort against jihadism, the intel work of
NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center. NCTC’s fusion of
terrorism-related intelligence has enabled analysis of jihadists
groups that has, in turn, informed U.S. policymakers as they weigh
tough choices in counterterrorism. NCTC’s mandate has generally
been understood to require it to focus on international terrorism,
not so-called domestic terrorism. But we need NCTC fully in the
game with respect to violent white supremacy.
Understanding today’s white supremacist threat as transnational
would seem to facilitate NCTC’S greater involvement. And if intel-
ligence community lawyers determine that a statutory amendment
is needed for NCTC to take on a larger role, I would respectfully
urge Congress and the President to provide that update to Federal
law. Adopting a transnational perspective also means the intel-
ligence community and law enforcement can bring to bear tools
proven to help against international terrorism, like robust intel-
ligence sharing with foreign partners and preventive law enforce-
ment tools like sting operations. It means rejuvenating efforts to
work with local communities to prevent radicalization in the first
place.
And for tech companies, it means policing their platforms to re-
move not just incitement to violence, but also, the ideological foun-
dations that spawn such violence.
 10

There are also lessons to be learned about what not to do in con-

fronting white supremacy, and I’ll hit three very quickly: First,
there’s reason for caution against taking the aggressive step of cre-
ating a domestic analog to the foreign terrorist organization des-
ignation regime. That would raise tough constitutional questions
and invite potentially fraught determinations about which groups
should be listed.
Second, augmenting efforts against violent white supremacy
must not be used as an excuse for interfering with the lawful ex-
pression of political advocacy.
It is the pursuit of political goals through violence that distin-
guishes terrorism, and preventing that violence must be the mis-
sion, not infringing on protected expression. Third, and finally, we
must enhance efforts to address violent white supremacy, but we
must not think that this is the only ideology that will attract global
adherence through modern technologies and spur some to violence.
Instead, we must anticipate that other ideologies are being
preached in the dark corners of the internet, just as white suprem-
acy was until it broke free.
So as we update counterterrorism laws, policies, and activities,
we should prepare to address all forms of politically motivated vio-
lence. Thank you.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much for your testimony. And Ms.
Mulligan, you’re recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF KATRINA MULLIGAN, MANAGING DIRECTOR,
NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY, CEN-
TER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
Ms. MULLIGAN. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before
you today. I want to align myself with the comments already made
regarding the transnational nature of violent white supremacy, but
once we recognize the international dimensions of this threat, we
need to think about what should be done about it. In my written
testimony, I lay out several specific ways the national security tools
can be brought to bear against this problem, but before I describe
some of those solutions, I will first say a few words about the cen-
tral role that protecting civil liberties and civil rights should play
in any solutions considered by this committee. Put simply, the gov-
ernment’s efforts to counter domestic terrorism should not harm
the communities we are trying to protect, or the civil liberties of
Americans.
The counterterrorism policies over the last two decades have un-
questionably made us safer, and as I will argue, some of those ef-
forts may prove useful in the counterterrorism fight ahead, but
they have not been without flaws. In the name of protecting the
homeland, some government approaches have been wrongly shaped
by stereotypes and ethno-religious prejudices, and others have been
ineffective and constitutionally problematic.
Because of this legacy, the idea of using national security tools
to counter this threat understandably concerns many in Muslim
communities, communities of color, and in the civil liberties and
privacy community. We should learn from them, not only because
these are the communities that are most often suffering from the
violence committed by white supremacists, but also because they
 11

have lived experiences with government counterterrorism efforts

and have perspectives on what has and has not made us safer.
We should also closely adhere to established limits on the domes-
tic use of counterterrorism efforts and national security tools, in-
cluding surveillance. In the recommendations I will make today, I
am not advocating for the expansion of the government’s law en-
forcement or intelligence authorities, and that’s because much can
be accomplished by creatively leveraging the tools and authorities
these agencies already have. I would like to highlight just a few ex-
amples. First, the Department of Justice and the Departments of
Homeland Security should lead an effort to develop a national
strategy to counter the threat posed by domestic terrorism. I’m
pleased to hear that DHS will be releasing a strategy today, but
I will be looking to see whether that strategy acknowledges that
violent white supremacy is currently the leading domestic threat to
the homeland, as it should.
DOJ should also expand and resource the office of the domestic
terrorism coordinator. In addition, the U.S. intelligence community
should explicitly identify and distinguish violent white suprema-
cists as threat actors, and increase the priority assigned to them
in the national intelligence priorities framework. As my colleague,
Josh Geltzer, has argued, there’s also much that the National
Counterterrorism Center can do. First, they should work with
international partners to investigate global links to white suprema-
cist violence and provide a coordinated assessment of the threat
posed by the movement, including any possible state sponsorships.
Second, NCTC should produce an unclassified report drawing
from the lessons learned over the last 18 years, identifying the
drivers that move extremists beyond radicalization to commit acts
of violence. The report should include an examination of how our
political leaders can avoid enflaming politically motivated violence
and play a constructive role in countering the threat. No political
leader wants their words twisted to justify violence, and NCTC’s
work can help us establish empirical benchmarks so that we can
enlist our political leaders in avoiding the kind of political rhetoric
that leads to violence.
Finally, I’d like to reflect on the subject of the hearing, and why
violent white supremacy is worthy of the attention it is receiving.
Republican lawmakers who survived a horrifying attack at a base-
ball practice a few blocks from my residence know well that politi-
cally motivated violence comes in all varieties and is no less mur-
derous when it is inspired by the far left than when it is inspired
by the far right. Politically motivated violence is worthy of serious
attention whenever it occurs, regardless of whether the perpetrator
is on the left or on the right.
What distinguishes violent white supremacy from other acts of
violence, though, is that it is inspired by an ideology that tran-
scends national borders. It’s conducted by attackers who situate
their actions in a transnational context. It is global, and because
of that, the Federal Government can and should prioritize it as a
national security concern. Thank you.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Ms. Mulligan.
And Ms. Owens, you’re recognized for five minutes.
 12
STATEMENT OF CANDACE OWENS, FOUNDER, BLEXIT, HOST,
CANDACE OWENS SHOW
Ms. OWENS. Thank you, Chairman, for the opportunity to testify.
I just want to testify just as a black American today, and I want
to first start off by saying that white supremacy is indeed real, but
despite the media’s obsessive coverage of it, it represents an iso-
lated, uncoordinated, and fringe occurrence within America. It’s a
fringe occurrence that is being used, in my opinion, by Democrats
to scare Americans into giving up their votes to a party that can
no longer win based on simple ideas, which is why we’re seeing so
many of these hearings back-to-back despite other threats that are
facing this Nation. I want to reiterate that point.
White supremacy is real, just as racism is real, but neither of
these ideologies are real in this room. They have become mecha-
nisms for the left to continue to call these hearings and to distract
from much bigger issues that are facing this country, and which
threaten minorities, much bigger issues that they are responsible
for.
White nationalism sounds a lot better as a threat than father ab-
sence. When are we going to call a hearing on the 74 percent of
single motherhood rate in black America today? My guess is prob-
ably never. Since Democrats are the author of that epidemic which
leaves us, black Americans, 20 times more likely to end up in pris-
on, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, and five times
more likely to lead a life in poverty and to commit crime. White
nationalism also sounds a lot better than illiteracy rates. I’m as-
suming we’re never going to call a hearing on that, which is a real
epidemic that is facing black Americans and minority Americans
today; an epidemic, which by the way, has a lot closer of a tie to
our Nation’s history of white supremacy.
Slave codes in the early 19th century made it illegal for black
Americans to learn to read. Why? Because if slaves could read,
they could access information. I don’t believe that much has
changed. On the most recent national assessment of educational
progress, just 17 percent of black students scored proficient in
reading at a 12th grade Level. 83 percent of blacks in America
were not found proficient in reading at a 12th grade level. Are we
going to have a hearing on that? Probably not.
White nationalism also sounds a lot better than abortion as a
threat, which has resulted in the slaughter of 18 million black
Americans since 1973, and points to a bigger crisis, which is the
fact that the black population growth has stagnated in this coun-
try. The crisis and the major cities, like in New York, we have
more black babies that are being aborted than born alive. If we’re
talking about preserving lives and we’re talking about white su-
premacy, we should probably have a conversation about that. But
today in this room, we’re going to see Democrats try to connect the
dots to white supremacy on the internet. So the question is why?
So that people who have absolutely nothing to do with propagating
white supremacy are censored, silenced, and controlled. What they
are actually after is our permission to censor and silence and con-
trol any dissenting voices that go against the mainstream narrative
that they wish to propagate.
 13

To give a glimpse into just how absurd and expansive a defini-

tion of white supremacy has become, I offer to the committee that
I have been libeled and smeared by Democrat media cohorts as
someone who supports white supremacy. You need but look at me
to determine that that just isn’t true. Why? Because I routinely say
black people don’t have to be Democrats. I am now considered
somebody that is radicalizing people on the internet. What a rad-
ical idea? Black people waking up to the abuses in the Democrat
Party, which has been instigated upon black America over the last
60 years.
There have been sincere attempts, just so everybody knows, to
censor me on social media because I am radical. YouTube once
censored me for criticizing Black Lives Matter. They reversed the
censorship and they apologized, and they called it a mistake.
Facebook once censored me for calling out liberal supremacy as a
threat facing black America. What I said specifically was that in
any community where liberal policies reign supreme, you will find
that black America is hurting. I stand by that assessment.
Facebook reversed my censorship, apologized, and claimed it was
a mistake.
Of course, I’m fortunate that I have a big enough platform that
when I get branded something extreme, I can reverse it, but the
majority of Americans don’t have that platform. The majority of
Americans with dissenting opinions are silenced forever.
Many words, which have once held very serious meanings, have
come to take on a different definition over the last couple of years
as Democrats have desperately tried to grapple with the fact that
they are no longer able to manipulate Americans with broad claims
and broad strokes of racism, sexism, misogyny, and the like. Words
like ‘‘racism,’’ which today most nearly means anything or anyone
that disagrees with a liberal, and terms like ‘‘white nationalism,’’
which today, and in this room and upon this floor, most nearly
means that its election time, America. It’s time for the left to do
what they do best: Divide, distract, and hope to keep their most im-
portant voting bloc to their party, which is black Americans, angry
and emotional and reactive enough to keep voting for the same
party that has systematically destroyed our families, sent our men
to prison, and deferred all of our dreams.
I will close out by telling you that this is not going to work.
America, and more importantly, black America, is waking up to the
ploy. The bad acting, the faux concerns, these hearings. It’s not
going to stop black America from breaking the chain of victimhood,
and it’s certainly not going to stop me from being one of the loudest
voices against it. Thank you.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you so much for your testimony.
Dr. Belew, let me start with you. I’m going to recognize myself
for five minutes.
In your prepared testimony, you stated that the perpetrators of
white supremacist violence in a lot of the recent episodes are often
portrayed as bad apples, or mentally ill or so on. And this gets us
to a very difficult problem. I’m thinking about two relatively analo-
gous episodes, one is of Omar Mateen, who was an admirer or a
follower of ISIS, but he wasn’t a member of ISIS, and apparently,
he had no contact with them that anybody could determine. He
 14

hadn’t been trained by them; he hadn’t plotted with them, but he

followed them online, and then he went to the nightclub—the Pulse
Nightclub in Orlando and assassinated 49 people.
Then the terrorist who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Syna-
gogue in Pittsburgh, he also radicalized on the internet as essen-
tially a follower of different white supremacist groups, but I don’t
think he was a member of any of those groups. I don’t think he was
trained by any of those groups, and so—and we’re far more inclined
to describe someone like that as a loner, isolated, mentally ill, and
I think Mateen was pretty quickly assimilated to the categorization
of terrorists, but they were sort of in similar situations. What is the
best way to think of people who self-radicalize, as you put it, on-
line? They follow a terrorist organization or movement internation-
ally, but they don’t have formal membership ties, and then they go
out and commit an act. Are they best seen as single, unstable indi-
viduals, or as part of a terrorist movement?
Ms. BELEW. So I think it actually helps to think about a different
example if you’ll permit me, but to go back to the example of
Dylann Roof, who was the gunman at the church shooting in
Charleston. He’s another one who we could think of as having self-
radicalized or radicalized online, but from his self-presentation, it’s
really clear that even if he never had, in real life, contact with
these groups, he was using their symbols, their ideology, and their
core texts to motivate his violence. Part of how we know that is he
posed for pictures wearing a Rhodesian flag patch. Now, the Rhode-
sian flag was not a live entity during Mr. Roof’s lifetime. That was
a government that had switched over to Zimbabwe before his birth,
but Rhodesia was enormously important to an earlier movement.
It was the subject of a ton of activity at Aryan nations, a flurry of
publication in white power presses, and it points to the way that
Mr. Roof’s ideology was informing his action. So what we have to
do is understand the context in which these people operate and
read the acts of violence as meaningful and purposeful to what
they are trying to carry out.
Mr. RASKIN. All right. Ms. Mulligan, do you agree with that ap-
proach that we should see people in this situation as part of a
broader movement, even if they don’t belong to an organization?
Ms. MULLIGAN. I believe we should, and I believe that’s what we
have done in other contexts.
Mr. RASKIN. That’s basically the way we’ve treated people who’ve
been inspired by ISIS or Al-Qaeda or any of the jihadist move-
ments that can be found online.
Ms. MULLIGAN. That is correct.
Mr. RASKIN. Is that right? And Dr. Geltzer, do you agree with
that too?
Mr. GELTZER. I do. I think the phrase ‘‘lone wolves’’ is dan-
gerously misleading, because part of what attracts these individ-
uals is the sense that signing up for this ideology, acting in its
name makes them precisely not alone. It makes them part of this
following that they join via the internet, first they follow it on open
social media, then they sometimes move into encrypted more direct
chats, and in some cases, they ultimately take up arms in the
name of that.
 15

Mr. RASKIN. So what have been the most effective techniques

then of trying to address the problem of people who, in a psycho-
logical sense, might be described as isolated, antisocial, apart from
the world, but who go online and then use the existence of all of
the propaganda online to self-radicalize and to self-motivate to go
out and kill? How do we deal with that problem while respecting
the basic freedom of discourse that’s on the internet?
Mr. GELTZER. One of the major findings of law enforcement and
the intelligence community is that even as these sorts of individ-
uals consume this material alone, there is, more often than not,
somebody in their lives—a parent, a teacher, a community member
who sees some sort of change. They may not understand exactly
what the change is, but they see something and it worries them.
And to have an open channel where those in the community under-
stand what to do about that, that can be crucial at taking this in
a different direction other than ultimately violence.
Mr. RASKIN. Great. Dr. Belew, I remember when there was a bit
of a controversy several years ago about people using the phrase
‘‘radical Islamist terror.’’ I don’t see why anybody had any problem
uttering that. Today, though, it seems a lot of people have the
problem uttering the phrase ‘‘violent white supremacy’’ or ‘‘violent
white nationalism.’’ Is it important for public figures and Members
of Congress, is it important for people in academia and journalism
to identify and to name the problem?
Ms. BELEW. Yes. And I think part of it is something that my co-
panelist was mentioning about these kind of diffuse definitions of
racism and white supremacy. The definitions are actually really
important, because what we’re talking about is not just kind of the
broader canvas of race relations that we all inhabit from day-to-
day, we’re talking about a small group of fringe actors who is in-
tent on violence against their local communities, against the
United States, and against the world at large. These actors are not
simply kind of run-of-the-mill ideologues. They’re violent actors
who are intent on taking action. Now that is not the same thing
as freedom of speech. I think reasonable people can agree that vio-
lent action against civilians represents an enormous social problem
for every political persuasion.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you. My time’s expired. I’m going to recognize
Mr. Roy for his five minutes of questioning. Oh, I’m sorry. Forgive
me. I’m going to go to Representative Wasserman Schultz from
Florida and then I’ll come back to you, Mr. Roy.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Mulligan, you testified that we need to know more about
how inflammatory rhetoric by political leaders can influence
radicalization and white supremacist violence and, you know, for
me, that brings up more recent current, what I consider potential
incitement, like when the President of the United States insisted
that there were good people on both sides at a deadly Neo-Nazi
rally in Charlottesville.
I think about the President smiling at a rally in Florida when
an attendee suggested border patrol should shoot immigrants cross-
ing the border, and the President’s nearly daily rhetoric and policy
that demonizes and dehumanizes immigrants and people of color.
What does the academic research show us, and this is actually ei-
 16

ther for—either or both of Ms. Mulligan or Dr. Belew, what does

the academic research tell us about the impact of inciting social di-
visions and how that can impact radicalization?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Would you like to take that one first?
Ms. BELEW. Go ahead.
Ms. MULLIGAN. Well, I can speak—I will, of course, defer to Dr.
Belew on the academic research, but one of the things that I’ve
been recommending is that we’ve learned a lot over the last 18
years of looking at the terrorism problem, about what causes peo-
ple to move along the spectrum from becoming radicalized to them
being mobilized to actually committing acts of violence. And there’s
a group at the National Counterterrorism Center called the radi-
calism and extremist messaging group that does fantastic work on
this that’s helped policymakers better understand the nature of
this problem.
We can and should, within existing authorities, leverage that
work to understand more about the extent to which the activities
of our political leaders can or are influencing a rise in violent white
supremacy, and we ought to learn more about the extent to which
it agrees with, or not, the academic research on this topic, which
certainly suggests that that’s the case.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you. Dr. Belew?
Ms. BELEW. So the history of the KKK, which is the organization
for which we have the longest, kind of, historical data, shows that
all of this activism really profits from opportunistically mobilizing
whatever existing scapegoats are available in a given time and
place. So if you think about the Klan in the 1920’s, which is the
biggest one, right? That’s the one that had 4 million people, 10 per-
cent of the state of Indiana and the one that was sort of seen as
mainstream and pro-American.
That Klan we remember as being antiblack and anti-Semitic, but
it was also anti-Mexican on the border, it was anti-immigrant in
the northeast where there are a lot of immigrants, it was antilabor
in the northwest where there was a lot of labor dispute, and anti-
Catholic in Indiana where Notre Dame University was. So what we
have to remember is that this is the kind of activism that works
by inflaming local tension, and kind of riding the wave of pre-
vailing public perception.
So any time we see these moments of broadly accepted anti-im-
migration, broadly accepted calls to violence, there’s going to be
ramifications within these fringe groups.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you.
For Dr. Geltzer and Ms. Mulligan, you both mentioned the grow-
ing influence of foreign powers, including, and especially Russia, in
promoting white supremacist ideologies.
Dr. Geltzer, can you describe a bit further how Russia is fueling
white supremacist ideologies around the world? And Ms. Mulligan,
can you share your perspective on what you think their objective
is? We had Russia obviously interfere in our elections in 2016, in
part, by drawing on deep-seated racism in our country and using
that to sow division and spread misinformation.
Mr. GELTZER. So Russia is fueling this movement in at least two
ways: One is actually on the ground, especially in a place like
Ukraine, where Russian groups, like the Russian imperial move-
 17

ment, and its paramilitary unit, the imperial legion volunteer unit,
are actually training foreign fighters to fight in the mantle of white
supremacy. That’s on the ground.
Then you have what’s happening online, where Russian
disinformation efforts, which happen in all forms, but in this area
are deliberately stoking anti-immigrant sentiments, not just here,
but in countries across Europe. It has been particularly well-docu-
mented in Sweden. And for more on this, I would commend Ali
Soufan’s recent testimony before House Homeland where he laid
out some of these connections to Russia, in particular, and the
state role in driving this.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you. And should we consider
weaponized white supremacy, Ms. Mulligan, or any of the three of
you, weaponized white supremacy a key threat to our election secu-
rity?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Absolutely. To the extent that what Russia or
any other foreign actors attempting to do by sowing division within
our society, we should absolutely consider it a threat, and I, you
know, commend some of the technology companies for beginning to
take that threat seriously, but obviously much more needs to be
done.
In the end of the day, this is not a problem that any one part
of the Federal Government or the private sector or civic society can
solve on its own. We’re going to have—much as we did in the last
18 years since 9/11, we’re going to have to work together with those
communities and enlist those partners in finding solutions.
Mr. RASKIN. The gentlelady’s time is expired. Thank you very
much. I go to Representative Green for his five minutes.
Mr. GREEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is obviously very
poignant for me, for those of you who know about Chattanooga,
and the terrorist attack that happened there. The young man was
born, I believe, in America, and radicalized online, and then, you
know, basically targeted our recruiting station and the Navy Re-
serve station killing six great American patriots.
This is, obviously, very important subject, but very near and dear
to our heart, because it’s happened in Tennessee. You mentioned,
Ms. Belew, about understanding the scale of this, and I’d be inter-
ested to hear from you, and I know these are hard questions to an-
swer, but, you know, this is just sort of my knee-jerk, well, how big
is the problem? And I’d like for you, if you could, to comment both
on white nationalism and on what struck Tennessee, which was Is-
lamic terrorism. In the white supremacist groups, how many people
are actually willing to do a terrorist attack? What’s that percent-
age? And then what’s the percentage that is okay with it if they
do? Because that’s kind of how we look at the Muslim terrorists.
What is the percentage that would actually put a suicide vest on,
and then what’s the percentage who thinks that’s okay, if you could
comment on those four, I guess, scales?
Ms. BELEW. Sure. Well, first, I think it’s helpful to think about
what this movement is and how it works when we’re thinking
about its size. So in the period that I focused on in my research,
we’re talking—which is the 1980’s, we’re talking about a movement
that’s organized kind of in concentric circles. In the middle are
what we would think of sort of as hard-core activists who, like, live
 18

and breathe this movement. Those are the people who can, under
the right circumstances, be pulled into a cell and then carry out
violent action. That’s only like 10,000 to 25,000 people. It’s a very
small group.
Outside of that, though, there’s another 150,000 people. They do
things like purchase newspapers, subscribe to the literature, come
out for public rallies, stuff like that. And outside of that, there’s an-
other 450,000 people. They don’t, themselves, buy the newspaper,
but they regularly read the newspaper.
Then outside of that is the number that scholars don’t have.
That’s the number of people who would never read a newspaper
that says, you know, official newspaper of the Knights of the KKK,
but who might agree with the ideas that are presented in it, espe-
cially if they come in through social relationships.
So that model of organizing does two really important things:
First, it moves people from the mainstream into the center; mean-
ing, into the more fringe, more violent capacity. It also pushes
ideas from the center out. So when we’re thinking about that ag-
gregate number, we’re talking about something that’s as big as
some fringe movements that are much better understood, like the
John Birch society. Similar numbers, but John Birch, at no point,
was, you know, carrying guns and attempting to overthrow the gov-
ernment.
Now, this question about the percentage that are violent and the
percentage that are okay with it and the relative comparison with
jihadism is a really interesting question. The thing is, we don’t
have the data. So one of the things that’s really important to do
is collect and aggregate that information. I can tell you that the
historical archive shows that in the aftermath of the Oklahoma
City bombing, which a lot of people, even in the white power move-
ment, thought was an abhorrent act of violence, mostly because of
the death of the white children there in the daycare center, even
still, there was an increase in militia group membership and num-
bers in the immediate aftermath of that attack. Now that would
signal to me as a historian that people were not decrying it at that
moment, but actually were okay with that violence in some capac-
ity, and many people were outright supportive in their own
writings.
Mr. GREEN. Thank you. I yield the remainder of my time to Con-
gressman Roy.
Mr. ROY. I thank my colleague from Tennessee and appreciate
those comments, Dr. Belew.
Dr. Geltzer, I was intrigued by a few of your statements as well,
and would like you, if you would not mind, to shed a little light
on—you talk about focusing on the foreign terrorist organization.
I think you answered the question to my colleague from Florida a
little bit on this. Quickly, is there an organization that you would
say there are adherents here in the states to organizations that are
specifically calling for action and what that looks like? That’s ques-
tion one. Question two is, on your point about constitutionally pro-
tected statements and thoughts regardless of how hideous they are,
and the difficulty that we have—so, it is a lot easier for us to go
after organizations and entities, right, and I think that’s what’s be-
 19

hind going after ISIS, Al-Qaeda, et cetera, and any of the affiliated
organizations, and we’re pretty good at that.
But in identifying lone wolves, regardless of whether you think
it’s a good idea to define a category of lone wolves, when we go
after lone wolves, it’s hard, right? We’re not as good at figuring
that out an adherent to an ideology, whether it’s white supremacy
or whether it’s jihad or anything else, right? Finding the lone wolf
out here that is clearly carrying out some of these horrible acts,
can you just comment on that balance of constitutionally protected
speech and how we can encourage law enforcement to go after bad
guys regardless of their ideology, but how ideology feeds into that
action? Sorry. I went too long.
Mr. GELTZER. Two hard but important questions. Let me take a
stab at the first initially. When I think about white supremacist
entities that might qualify as foreign terrorist organizations, the
place that I actually look is the current national strategy for
counterterrorism, which I think is a very strong document overall
issued by the Trump administration last year, and it names two
particular groups: a Scandinavian group called the Nordic Resist-
ance Movement; a British group called the National Action Group.
And it talks about them in the context of the transnational net-
work of white supremacy we’ve been discussing here today, and it
points to them as having links to Americans, including potentially
threatening Americans.
Now, the criteria for foreign terrorist organization designation is
particular, we could go through what it is. It seems to me that lan-
guage in an official government document, at least, suggests that
those two might qualify, and it’s worth designating them if they do
because then financial institutions create a blinking red light
around assets to the extent anyone in America or anyone in law
enforcement can get its hands on, is trying to provide material sup-
port to them. It allows prosecutors to have that tool in the tool kit.
So we’d know more, in other words, if we went down the road
of designating only groups that actually qualify and then empow-
ered those using financial and law enforcement tools to make use
of that.
Quickly, if I may, on the idea of individuals, this is the hardest
form of counterterrorism in any context, whether it’s ISIS-inspired,
white-supremacist-inspired. Those individuals, especially like an
Omar Mateen, who seem to sit and stew in front of a computer and
then act. That is why I turn to my earlier answer to the idea of
ensuring the communities have a place to turn when they see
something changing.
It also leads to law enforcement respecting speech, but also doing
what it has done effectively in the context of jihadism, which is
using informants and sting operations. They’re sometimes con-
troversial, but there are limiting principles in DOJ and FBI guid-
ance for how they can be used and where it’s appropriate to use
them in this context. I do think that they have prevented attacks
in that other context. I hope that’s helpful.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much.
Mr. Rouda, you’re recognized for five minutes.
Mr. ROUDA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for con-
vening this meeting.
 20

It was just a few months ago that I was here at a committee

meeting, and during a break, I had the opportunity to meet Sydney
Walton, who’s a hundred years old, a World War II vet, who fought
with many other Americans to defeat Nazism, and many did not
come back and paid the ultimate price to our country. And it’s out-
landish to think that we are here almost 75 years later from the
defeat of Germany in World War II, fighting white supremacy once
again.
And this is a bipartisan issue. It certainly should be a bipartisan
issue, and I’m glad to see that it is. And it’s not just white suprem-
acy; it’s extremism, period. We need to fight it on all fronts, but
we have seen growth in white supremacy. There’s approximately a
thousand hate groups located in the United States, spurring out
defamatory information, and unfortunately, a lot of that is affecting
our kids.
In my district, in Orange County alone, we’ve had numerous inci-
dents, from an African American student in my community who
has periodically had watermelons thrown on the driveway, to a
group of students having a party with a swastika made out of beer
cups, to Nazi posters being posted at the schools, to graffiti on tem-
ples, to students that are doing goose-stepping and salutes while on
school grounds and having it filmed and sharing it. So we know
that the radicalization is happening. And I think the big concern
we have for many of us is how the internet is playing into that
process. In fact, The Daily Stormer has stated publicly that, quote,
my site is mainly designed to target children, unquote.
Dr. Belew, can you describe how white supremacists are using
the internet and social media to radicalize our children?
Ms. BELEW. Absolutely. So this is one of the interesting places
where what seems very new to us in the current moment is actu-
ally something with deep historical roots. So this movement started
getting online on the proto-internet in 1983, 1984, with a series of
coded message boards called Liberty Net. Now, those message
boards included the things that they needed for immediate race
war, like assassination lists, infrastructure target lists, and ideo-
logical content, but it also included things like recipe exchanges
and personal ads. So, effectively, this movement has been using so-
cial network activism to move people around and organize this for
decades before Facebook. We are several——
Mr. ROUDA. And this is a movie we’ve seen before. It’s the same
thing that ISIS did as well, correct?
Ms. BELEW. Yes, absolutely. My only argument with that is that
I don’t think they took this from ISIS. I think they’ve been doing
this since the early 1980’s completely on their own.
Mr. ROUDA. But what’s the answer to address it? How do we ad-
dress the use of social media to stop the radicalization of our chil-
dren?
Ms. BELEW. I think that’s a really great question. I think that
one of the things that would help is broadening the interagency
conversation around this issue, because it occurs to me that the
place where the conversations about social network content are
happening is at the FTC. And I’m on fellowship at Silicon Valley
this year, so I’ve been talking to a lot of the tech people. There’s
all kinds of algorithmic tools, language detection tools, and other
 21

kinds of things we can do to get into those internet chat rooms and
to look at the person who’s by themselves in front of the computer.
But the stuff you’re talking about is bigger than that, because
when we’re talking about the stuff like postering campuses, white
student union, all of that is from the earlier playbook. And what
we know from the history is that that kind of public-facing stuff
that’s targeting children has been matched historically by a big
paramilitary underground that includes things like taking those
children to paramilitary training camps, outfitting them with
weapons, and that’s how they turn people into soldiers for this
movement. People in their teens are enormously recruitable, and I
think it’s absolutely an area of focus.
Mr. ROUDA. And, Dr. Geltzer, let me—thank you for your an-
swer.
Dr. Geltzer, let me ask you, look, we know that some
radicalization literally happens at home. And for some, though,
many times the parents are—and family members are extremely
surprised to find that their brother, their sister, their child, has
been radicalized. Are there signs that we should be looking for? Are
their ways that we can interject as parents or siblings to try and
prevent the radicalization of a loved one?
Mr. GELTZER. I do think there’s a broader role for digital literacy
in our society that would at least be somewhat helpful with respect
to this and, frankly, other problems that our Nation faces. There
are other countries that have invested in this idea—Estonia,
France is now catching up—in trying to ensure at an early age that
young people, who inevitably are using digital devices already,
have some sense of what not to believe, at least what to be skep-
tical of. Because the internet is never going to be a totally curated
place. It’s going to have some disinformation, misinformation, and
even exhortations to violence.
But to empower, especially the youth, to at least be skeptical, to
treat that skeptically and to take it from their digital experience
to their parents, to their real-world connections and ask about it,
and engage in a conversation, I think that’s an important direction
to go in.
Mr. ROUDA. Thank you. And I——
Ms. BELEW. May I add something?
Mr. RASKIN. The gentleman’s time is expired, but you can answer
the question if you want to say a word.
Ms. BELEW. Thank you.
I just wanted to add that another place that this dovetails,
there’s a conversation about general sort of—general mass attacks
and the role of young teen boys particularly in being drawn into
kind of mass shootings, partly through internet activity. Health
and Human Services might consider doing something like giving
grants to nonprofits like Life After Hate and the Free Radicals
Project, which are staffed by people who have left the movement
after their own radicalization and know firsthand how it works and
how to reach people who are right now in these groups or who
might be pulled in.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you.
Mr. ROUDA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you again for
convening this meeting.
 22

Mr. RASKIN. And thank you, Mr. Rouda.

I recognize the ranking member, Mr. Roy, for five minutes.
Mr. ROY. I thank the chairman very much.
One quick question for Dr. Geltzer or Dr. Belew. Do we have a
number of people that we believe have been killed as a result of
something that you could define as white nationalism or so forth,
say, in 2019 or 2018? I’ve looked at the—you know, ADL’s got some
stats, like 50, or whatever. It depends on how you define it. Do you
all have an answer for that, just quickly?
Mr. GELTZER. I don’t have the exact number. I know some who
keep these stats recently indicated, as I think the chairman men-
tioned, that post-9/11 the number in this category recently exceed-
ed the number that we generally think of as in the jihadist cat-
egory. But even those stats, the numbers are difficult. Certain mo-
tivations for attacks are difficult to categorize.
Mr. ROY. Yes. And that’s, I think—I wanted to come back to you,
Ms. Owens, about some of my concerns here in terms of perspec-
tives. So we all share a desire to go fight that, right? But then per-
spective, in terms of what we’re talking about, in terms of crimes,
right, if we look at what’s going on in Chicago right now, right,
and, Ms. Owens, I wanted your perspective on this. I mean, some
of the numbers are pretty astounding, right? I mean, we’ve had 300
and something murders in Chicago this year. The number varies
and it changes literally by the day, sadly and tragically. And I’m
looking at some data here—I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent
accurate—that black victims of the murders are 291 murders in
Chicago just this year alone. And you can go through, you know,
different data points, black homicide victimization. I’ve got a stat
here, 13 percent of the U.S. population, yet 51 percent of homicide
victims.
Can you speak a little bit about that and about the reality of that
and some of the policies that lead to that and your perspective on
that element of crime?
Ms. OWENS. Certainly, which is why I wanted to bring that up,
because presumably, if we’re going to be having a hearing on white
supremacy, we are assuming that the biggest victims of that would
be minority Americans, and presumably this hearing would be to
stop that and to make sure that we can preserve the lives of minor-
ity Americans, which—and based on the hierarchy of what’s im-
pacting minority Americans, if I had to make a list of 100 things,
white nationalism would not make the list. And we don’t see hear-
ings on those bigger issues.
You brought up the inner city communities, which is a huge
issue, black-on-black crime, the breakdown of family, I think, is the
No. 1 thing that’s contributing to that, and we never hear anybody
talking about what happens when you remove a father from the
home. In fact, I would argue that right now, we have a social envi-
ronment that is hostile toward men and does not inspire mascu-
linity or being a man and what it means to be a father figure in
a household. Black Americans are definitely suffering from the
breakdown of the family.
And when I say that liberal policies inspire that, what I mean
to say is that via the welfare system, we are quite literally seeing
the incentivization of bad behavior. When you know that your fam-
 23

ily gets more money—as a single mother, you will get more money
if you don’t marry the father of your children, you’re not going to
marry the father of your children. I’ve seen this firsthand.
And black-on-black crime is a huge issue in America right now,
but people don’t like to talk about that. It seems, well, let’s talk
about the smaller issues and not the big issues that are facing
black America. We saw this same sort of a narrative in 2016 when
police brutality became at the forefront of the discussion. And if
you were paying attention to politicians, you would have thought
that if you were a black American, you couldn’t walk outside with-
out being shot by a police officer, when, in fact, you had a higher
chance of being struck by lightning as a black American in 2016
than being shot unarmed by a police officer.
The truth is that leftists and Democrats don’t want to see these
issues fixed in black America because then they can’t stump on
those issues. You know, we see this rhetoric every four years,
ahead of an election cycle, get drummed up. We heard—Chairman
Raskin in his opening statement mentioned the Trump administra-
tion is doing nothing, and that really is the nucleus of what we’re
seeing here today. We are trying to see—we’re seeing an attack on
an administration, an attack on conservatism ideals ahead of an
election cycle. There’s no real effort to fix the issues that are in
black America, the things that are hurting minority America be-
cause, believe me, they don’t want those issues to be fixed.
Mr. ROY. Ms. Owens, you said that this issue that we’re talking
about here today, which we all agree obviously is an important
issue, to root out crime and root out criminal organizations and ac-
tivities and figure out how to target criminals, bad actors, et
cetera. You said it wouldn’t make the top 100 of the things that
you’re concerned about as a black American, concerned about black
communities in America. What would? You can’t rattle off all 100,
but in the time I’ve got——
Ms. OWENS. Father absence, the education system, and the stag-
gering abortion rate, as well as illegal immigration, which, you
know, the United States Commission of Civil Rights, when they
were actually doing work in 2008, came out with a report and told
the truth, which is that illegal immigration harms black Americans
first and foremost. We are the ones that are meant to compete with
illegals for jobs, and they are flooding our communities with crime
and violence. Black American men between the ages of 18 and 22
are harmed by illegal immigration, but just saying that perspective
is considered racist, and it’s not.
Mr. RASKIN. The gentleman’s time is expired. Thank you very
much.
And I recognize the gentlelady from the Second District of Illi-
nois, Ms. Kelly.
Ms. KELLY. Before I ask my questions, I have to—my mic’s on.
Before I ask my questions, I just have to make a comment about
where I represent, Chicago. And there are many reasons why there
is gun violence. So we do need to invest more, you know, in various
communities, but the other reason is because we don’t have the
laws that we need. Chicago, as people like to say, oh, they have
strong gun laws, but most of our guns don’t come from the Chi-
cago—from Chicago. It’s because of the lack of national trafficking
 24

laws, straw purchasing, we can’t even get a background law

passed. So I just want to clear the record there. There are
many——
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you, Ms. Kelly. Will you just speak directly
in your microphone? We seem to be having some kind of sound dif-
ficulty. If you would.
Ms. KELLY. Okay. Now to my questions.
Mr. RASKIN. Apparently that one is sort of dysfunctional. So if
you could talk into Mr. Rouda’s. And thank you, we’ll account for
the time, yes.
Ms. KELLY. Do I need to repeat what I just said or just go to my
questions?
Mr. RASKIN. If you want to just restate the point that you were
making about gun violence generally so we can all hear it.
Ms. KELLY. Yes, just that we’ve—I’ve been here going into my
seventh year, and it’s been very difficult to get any legislation
passed about gun violence. And, yes, Chicago has strong laws, but
no one else around us does. The majority of our crime guns come
from Indiana and Wisconsin. And until we pass some national laws
to deal with this, there are going to be those issues. And, yes, we
do need to invest in the communities. There’s not one reason, you
know, why it happens, but I have to make that clear, and that we
are having hearings, finally, about gun violence, about maternal
mortality, and on and on and on. So we are doing those things now.
So to my questions. Ms. Mulligan, what concerns do you have
about white supremacists, extremism, in the ranks of law enforce-
ment and intelligent communities? And I will add that I come from
a law enforcement family, so nothing against law enforcement.
Ms. MULLIGAN. So it’s clear that the threat of violent white su-
premacy is not limited to those who are outside of our law enforce-
ment and national security communities. You mentioned, you
know, law enforcement and police departments. I think another
place where we see signs of radicalization that are troubling is ac-
tually in our Active Duty and returning members of the military.
And I think one of the things that makes it, you know, that makes
it quite difficult to address is that those are the people who are
supposed to be making—you know, keeping us safe. And we should
have absolutely no tolerance for those types of ideologies in law en-
forcement, in the intelligence community, in any part of the Fed-
eral Government, to include the military.
And I do believe that most of those types of employment situa-
tions have rules and regulations that prohibit it. The question is
whether they’re being adequately enforced. And I think that more
should be done in that arena.
Ms. KELLY. Thank you. I ask just because of the Plain View
Project that we heard so much, you know, on the news about.
Which agencies specifically have a role to play in helping address
this problem, and what should they be doing? Ms. Mulligan, Dr.
Belew?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Yes. Thank you for the question. There’s actually
quite a lot that many departments and agencies can do, but I actu-
ally will start with the White House. The National Security Council
staff should actively implement last year’s National Strategy for
Counterterrorism, which Dr. Geltzer earlier mentioned. It identifies
 25

domestic forms of violent extremism as terrorist threats, and in

driving department and agency action, it really ought to have the
leading role.
Some of the other departments and agencies that have a role to
play include the Department of Justice, the Department of Home-
land Security. Unfortunately, DHS, notwithstanding the strategy
that apparently is being released today, has recently decreased
funding and resourcing for this problem.
The FBI, obviously, has a very large role to play, as does the U.S.
intelligence community, particularly where the transnational
threats are involved. The National Counterterrorism Center, as we
previously mentioned, can and should do more within existing au-
thority, and there are questions that ought to be explored about
whether more is necessary there as well. But even the Department
of State has a role to play.
Thank you.
Ms. KELLY. And, Dr. Belew, in your research, did you find any
links between white supremist groups or ideologies and individuals
serving in official law enforcement roles?
Ms. BELEW. So I don’t have the archive to talk about law enforce-
ment, but one thing that did come up is that if you track the surges
in clan activity, it’s a group that has big ebbs and flows over time.
It always aligns with the aftermath of warfare. And let me be real-
ly clear about this. I’m not saying that that means the clan is made
of veterans or that veterans are, you know, more likely to anything
related to this. We’re talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percent-
age of returning vets and Active Duty troops. But what we do find
is that this movement is misusing those servicemembers in order
to augment its violent capacity against civilians.
I study things like, one of these groups obtained tons—literal
tons—of stolen military weapons and material from the Army post
at Ft. Bragg. They carried out paramilitary training camps all
around the country using the expertise of Active Duty troops. And
after 1983, participation in this movement is fundamentally op-
posed to the oath of induction, because you cannot be serving to
protect the United States from enemies foreign and domestic at the
same time that you are trying to overthrow it. It’s a fundamental
problem within the services, and the DOD absolutely needs to be
part of monitoring and reporting this activity. I think its reporting
efforts probably are either miscounting or misreporting what’s hap-
pening.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you.
Ms. KELLY. Thank you.
Mr. RASKIN. The gentlelady’s time is expired.
I recognize our friend from Louisiana, Mr. Higgins, and I think
votes may be called after that.
Mr. Higgins.
Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the panelists
for appearing before us today.
We all condemn any form of supremacy, white supremacy, all
forms of domestic terrorism, and hate crimes. I was born in 1961,
seventh of eight children. I was in the second grade, public school,
when our school was integrated. I am a 58-year-old product of the
American generation that has struggled to transcend racism in
 26

America. I believe in our country. I wear a band upon my wrist

that says ‘‘redemption.’’ It doesn’t say perfection. Redemption is a
journey, not a destination. All of us are on that journey, and I be-
lieve that our Nation is on that journey. I believe that our Lord cre-
ated this in his own image. On a spiritual level, we are one, and
yet as a Nation, we’ve largely rejected traditional American values:
family unity, discipline, and prayer.
As a street cop for many years, prior to becoming a Congress-
man, I dealt with white supremacists on the street level. I dealt
with black supremacists on the street level. I dealt with racism and
bigotry in every conceivable manifestation. It was a common thread
amongst those children of God that I interacted with. They were
broken inside. They were broken inside. This is what we must ad-
dress. America suffers a generational deterioration of spirit. Only
by courageous interaction, by discarding extremist reaction to ex-
tremist action, by embracing humility and honest, candid commu-
nication can America heal itself.
Ms. Owens, I’ll be speaking at the NAACP annual state conven-
tion in Louisiana one week from tomorrow. Could be argued that
I’m a quite unlikely keynote speaker at that gathering, but I shall
deliver a candid and unscripted message from my heart and from
bended knee, as an American that recognizes that our Nation has
suffered a failure of spirit, that our Nation is on a journey.
I would ask you, madam, in my remaining time, what message
would you hope to hear me deliver to my brothers and sisters in
Louisiana one week from tomorrow, an address which I believe
should be reflective of our effort as a Nation, to bridge the divides
that falsely separate us, to embrace the fact that we’re created in
God’s own image? What message would you have me share, good
lady, and I shall listen?
Ms. OWENS. That’s a beautiful question. I would say if I was in
that audience, what I would want to hear is just a message of hope.
I think that what’s been taken away from black America is our
sense of pride. We’ve allowed rhetoric and policies to tether us to
the government. And I love that you opened your statement talking
about God and the family, because those are the things that we
used to value first and foremost in the black American community,
and as government grew in the 1960’s, all of that was pretty much
taken away from us.
I would remind them to consider who is really the author—who
are really the authors in society today of trying to separate us as
a society. I personally believe it’s the media. I believe it’s when
somebody sitting in—a Congress Member sits down and perpet-
uates the lie that our President said there were good people on
both sides without mentioning that he said, and I’m not talking
about white nationalists. It’s important for black America to begin
thinking rationally and not emotionally and to no longer allow our-
selves to be used and abused and lied to by a party and policies
that have not served us for the last six decades.
And I would ask you to ask the one question, what do they have
to lose, and I think the answer is nothing.
Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you for your counsel, ma’am. I shall take it
to my heart.
 27

Ms. Mulligan, Dr. Belew, Dr. Geltzer, thank you for appearing
today.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for allowing me to speak. I yield back.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you, Mr. Higgins, and please be sure to share
your address with us after you give it.
We’re going to call a recess, subject to the call of the chair. We
will return immediately after final floor votes are called, and that
should be in about 45 minutes. I know that Mr. Hice is here for
his questioning, as the ranking member of the National Security
Subcommittee, and I know that Mr. Lynch is coming back and
wants to question everyone. And there are several other members
who will be joining us then. So everybody stay tuned, and the com-
mittee will now stand in recess.
[Recess.]
Mr. RASKIN. All right. The subcommittees’ hearing will come to
order and resume.
It is my pleasure to recognize Chairman Lynch for five minutes.
Mr. LYNCH. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman. And let me apolo-
gize again for the other committee activity that’s been going on at
the same time.
So I was elected on September 11, 2001. The day of the attacks,
I was elected in a special election in a Democratic primary in Mas-
sachusetts. And I remember how the whole of government was re-
focused on a response to those attacks, both offshore and here at
home. We created the National Counterterrorism Center to im-
prove the fusion and analysis of terrorist-related intelligence
among our 16 intelligence agencies, to better connect the dots, to
prevent future terrorist attacks.
I know, Dr. Geltzer, you discussed the NCTC, the National
Counterterrorism Center, during your opening remarks. Did you, in
fact, work with the NCTC prior with your work on the National Se-
curity Council?
Mr. GELTZER. I did, Mr. Chairman. I got to work with NCTC
quite a bit.
Mr. LYNCH. Now, just to flesh that out a little bit, the National
Counterterrorism Center is outward facing, is it not, partly because
of the response of that day and our activities thereafter? Is it suit-
ed and structured to deal with white nationalism, white suprema-
cist terrorism?
Mr. GELTZER. I think there’s room to get much more of NCTC’s
help in this aspect of——
Mr. LYNCH. How would we do that? You know, I know that many
of our privacy folks get very nervous, as do I, when we—when we
retarget domestic activity because, you know, the American people,
we have an obligation to make sure privacy rights are protected.
And this surveillance sort of and intervention protocol makes a lot
of people nervous in that regard. And I was hoping that you might
be able to help us approach this with existing resources and struc-
tures so we’re not expanding, you know, the rights of law enforce-
ment or counterterrorism agencies to actually, you know, spy on
the citizens of the United States.
Mr. GELTZER. Yes, Mr. Chairman, so that’s part of why I think
this framing that this hearing has adopted of emphasizing the
transnational nature of today’s violent white supremacist threat is
 28

particularly helpful. Because the statutory language on NCTC’s

mandate is not crystal clear, but it’s generally been understood to
focus them or perhaps overwhelmingly direct NCTC toward inter-
national terrorism. But what you’ve heard today from me, from fel-
low panelists, is that this actually is a form of international ter-
rorism. And that would seem to, within existing statutory authori-
ties, activate NCTC and allow it to play the role in this area that
I saw firsthand it play when it came to jihadism.
That role included everything from very big picture strategic
analyses, looking at trends and trajectories of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al
Shabaab, where they were headed, what their new online recruit-
ment tactics were, to more granular issues, such as fusing intel-
ligence across the community about particular threats, which in-
formed policymakers as they deliberated about how to respond to
those threats. And if this is the transnational threat that it seems
to be, that seems to invite NCTC’s participation in understanding
it and addressing it.
Mr. LYNCH. Would we have to prove that nexus is there? Because
many of these individual actors have no organizational connection,
but they have an ideological connection.
Mr. GELTZER. It is difficult, and I believe that intelligence com-
munity lawyers should be cautious, for many of the reasons you in-
dicated before. They are one piece of the structure of safeguards to
protect Americans and others against an overreach on the part of
our intelligence community. If those lawyers being cautious feel
that the current statutory language does restrict them from looking
at least at key aspects of the picture we’re talking about today,
then I think there would be a valid basis for considering getting
NCTC, through statutory amendment, into the game on even do-
mestic terrorism. And to be clear, that’s no new collection authori-
ties.
Mr. LYNCH. Right.
Mr. GELTZER. That’s no new ability to surveil. It’s instead about
NCTC being able to take what is already collected under existing
authorities and analyze it in the way NCTC has done, to my mind,
quite effectively since 9/11 for other types of terrorist threats.
Mr. LYNCH. Very good. So it’s a matter of deploying resources as
opposed to seeking new powers?
Mr. GELTZER. I think that’s right.
Mr. LYNCH. Yes. Dr. Belew, would you like to add anything to
that?
Ms. BELEW. I think I would just underscore that, the fact that
leaderless resistance is a mode of organizing that appears not to
have connections within it, it is still a mode of organizing. It’s not
that there is not an organizational connection between these actors;
it’s that we have to recalibrate and understand how it works, much
like the intelligence community did around jihadism.
So I think the correction that needs to happen is within our own
thinking and speaking about this to recognize that as strategic. It’s
deliberate on the part of the movement to obfuscate what they’re
doing and to make it really difficult to prosecute and surveil.
Mr. LYNCH. Yes. We see that on Achan.
Ms. BELEW. Yes.
Mr. LYNCH. Ms. Mulligan?
 29

Ms. MULLIGAN. So what I would add to what my colleagues have

already contributed is that our law enforcement—our existing law
enforcement tools really aren’t well situated to investigate groups.
They typically are individualized crimes that are being inves-
tigated. And so the value add of bringing the authorities that
NCTC has to bear on this problem—and to be clear, there’s a lot
that can be done within their existing statutory framework. What
they can bring to bear is the group dimension, the potential links
to state sponsors, and a better ability to engage with our foreign
partners about the trends and dynamics and statistics that they’re
seeing in their own countries.
Mr. LYNCH. I see. Is that happening now, Dr. Geltzer, in terms
of, you know, the cross-pollinization among local agencies? I know
we have the Joint Terrorism Task Force and that does some of
that, but is that happening generally?
Mr. GELTZER. I think we’ve built structures for it, but I think
those structures have, since 9/11, overwhelmingly been directed to-
ward other forms of violent extremism, in particular jihadism. And
to activate that with respect to this form of a threat, obviously a
threat that’s growing and concerns us all, I think that’s an impor-
tant recalibration of our resources and our priority.
Also, to pick up on Ms. Mulligan’s point, in terms of NCTC’s di-
rector engaging with foreign counterparts, which is a critical part
of that job, those conversations, as I understand it from people
who’ve held that role, have really been about jihadism, because
that’s what NCTC has been focused on. If this becomes part of
what NCTC analyzes and helps us all to understand, it then allows
the person in that very, very important role to have meaningful
conversations with foreign partners about this violent white su-
premacist threat.
Mr. LYNCH. Very good. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I notice my time is expired. I yield back.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Lynch.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton from the District of Co-
lumbia is recognized now for five minutes.
Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I really
thank you for your focus on this set of hearings.
As we have seen the frightening rise of white supremacy in a
way we had, many of us, particularly from the civil rights move-
ment, thought we would never again see in our country. You look
at the Charlottesville rally, the Proud Boys rally in Portland, and
you see people openly proclaiming white supremist ideas. So your
hearing is very well placed.
First, I’d like to know—perhaps Dr. Belew can answer this ques-
tion—we look at existing counterterrorism strategies and have to
wonder whether they take into account the rise of white supremacy
in—as we see white supremacy further penetrating the American
consciousness of some in our country. Doctor—I guess it is really
Dr. Geltzer who I should direct this question to. How does the fact
that white supremacy is so much more mainstream—if I can use
that word. I don’t want the American public to think we think that
they have bought into this, but I’ll use that—more mainstream at
least than Islamic jihadism, how does that change the way we
think about it in national security terms?
 30

Mr. GELTZER. Thank you for the question, Congresswoman. I

think the emergence of white supremacism, as you say, not at all
as a mainstream view, but instead as something of increasing sig-
nificance as a threat, and a national security threat, I think that
needs to get reflected in the strategies that ultimately guide re-
sources and priorities for the counterterrorism pieces of the U.S.
Government.
Ms. NORTON. Do you see it reflected yet?
Mr. GELTZER. Probably insufficiently, but my hope is that we’re
moving and that we will—accelerate moving in a better direction.
So going back to last year’s National Strategy for Counterter-
rorism, there was at least explicit reference to it. And I give the
administration strategy credit for including that acknowledge-
ment——
Ms. NORTON. Last year’s what? I’m sorry.
Mr. GELTZER. Last year’s National Strategy for Counterter-
rorism.
Ms. NORTON. Yes.
Mr. GELTZER. Now, today, as I believe the chairman mentioned
earlier, today, the Department of Homeland Security is anticipated
to release its own strategy implementing, showing how that De-
partment in particular will implement that broader whole-of-gov-
ernment strategy. And my understanding is that the Department
of Homeland Security will be explicit about this nature of the
threat, and I think that’s an important step forward to do so, be-
cause 9/11 drove home, it was obvious after 9/11, the importance
of acting against jihadism. Here we need something that drives
that home not just to the American people, but also to the parts
of government that answer to those strategy documents.
Ms. NORTON. I’m looking at law enforcement and counterter-
rorism agencies to see what they, in particular, are doing in white
communities. For example, law enforcement agencies have often re-
lied heavily on communities of color to police themselves and iden-
tify people who were exhibiting signs of potential extremism.
Dr. Geltzer, are law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies
doing the same thing with white communities, calling on them to
identify supremists—white supremist threats in their neighbor-
hoods? Should they be doing so? Should we be doing more, relying
on our own people, who we know don’t generally embrace these ex-
treme ideologies?
Mr. GELTZER. My basic answer is that, for whatever form of po-
litically motivated violence, activating communities to be a source
of help, a source of identifying the problem, that’s important. That’s
critical. Because as I mentioned earlier, it’s often someone in the
community who sees at least some change. It’s not obvious to them
necessarily that the change is one pointing toward terrorism or
some other form of violence, but they see some change in the sort
of individuals whom we would probably describe here as going
down a path of radicalization, potentially toward violent extre-
mism.
And when I was in government, I remember community aware-
ness briefings, CABs, that were offered by a couple of different de-
partments and agencies, quite deliberately talked about different
forms of violent extremism, so that there was no sense that any
 31

one community was being picked on or that any one type of vio-
lence was the only kind the government cared about. Obviously, if
you’re a victim or family member of a victim, you don’t care which
political ideology motivates the attack that takes a life; you care
about that awful consequence. And I think that should drive the
government’s response.
Ms. NORTON. Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman, directing our national security efforts toward
white extremism of this kind before it gets completely out of hand
is very important. That’s why this hearing is so important to us.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Representative Norton.
I turn now to Mr. Welch from Vermont for five minutes.
Mr. WELCH. Thank you.
Couple of questions. I want to ask Dr. Belew whether violent
white supremists, in your view, act purely out of individual hate
or do they view themselves as carrying out a strategy of a larger
social or ideological movement?
Ms. BELEW. So acts of mass violence in the white power move-
ment are not imagined as the end point of this ideology. They’re
supposed to awaken other activists to join the movement and to
carry out similar actions. So something like—we can see this in
something like the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white
power activist carried out that activity not just to kill the people
in the Federal building, although that’s one of the outcomes of that
action, but also it’s meant to inspire others, and it did. People are
hanging McVeigh’s picture in their homes. They’re talking about
him online as a hero of the movement, and they’re using that as
a model for future violent activism.
Similarly, the manifestos that we’re seeing in this most recent
spate of attacks have inside of them things like tactical instruc-
tions for future gunmen about target selection, ammunition selec-
tion.
Mr. WELCH. So that stuff is on the internet?
Ms. BELEW. Oh, yes. This is all on the internet.
Mr. WELCH. Do we have some copies of that? I’d love to see that.
Mr. RASKIN. We can get that, yes.
Mr. WELCH. Continue.
Ms. BELEW. Sure. I think the other thing I would say is that it’s
important to remember that the key thing people often are missing
about this ideology is the critical piece of information about how a
tiny fringe movement of people thinks they possibly can do what
they’ve set out to do——
Mr. WELCH. Right.
Ms. BELEW [continuing]. which is overthrow the U.S. Govern-
ment, the most militarized super state in world history, right? And
in order to understand that, we really have to take seriously this—
the thing that answers that imaginative question is this dystopian
novel from the late 1970’s called ‘‘The Turner Diaries.’’ You’ll see
it talked about a lot, because it’s more than just a novel. It sort
of becomes this cultural lodestar of the movement because it fills
in this imaginative gap and explains how these actors think they
could possibly accomplish this.
It lays out a series of steps, the first being guerrilla warfare and
sabotage and mass attacks, like Oklahoma City or El Paso or
 32

Charleston. But it escalates into seizing a white homeland and

eventually overthrowing the United States and annihilating people
of color around the world. So it’s profoundly violent.
Mr. WELCH. So it’s really important to put this—to acknowledge
that these acts are not just acts of hate; they’re political acts in-
tended to have a political effect——
Ms. BELEW. Yes.
Mr. WELCH [continuing]. that will be magnified. So——
Ms. BELEW. Yes. And as I think one of your witnesses said in an
earlier hearing, hate crimes and domestic terror are not mutually
exclusive, but not every hate crime is an act of domestic terror.
What we’re talking about today is domestic terror.
Mr. WELCH. So how—what’s an approach to deal with that? I
mean, if it’s an ideology, people believe what they believe, and it’s
generally very difficult to persuade someone who is ideologically
committed to whatever it is they’re committed to, that, quote,
they’re wrong.
Ms. BELEW. I think that’s right, but I think we do have some or-
ganizations who are doing the very, very difficult kind of frontline
work of reaching people in these groups and helping them leave the
movement. So creating a grants program to fund those organiza-
tions would be enormously helpful to ratcheting down some of that
activity and recruitment power in the short term.
Mr. WELCH. How? Just explain how that would work. I mean, if
I had—let’s say we had a program that wanted to address this,
how would we do outreach to people that we need to talk to?
Ms. BELEW. Oh, I think you fund existing nonprofits that are al-
ready doing this, like Life After Hate and the Free Radicals
Project, which are manned by people who used to be violent white
power activists and who get more call volume than they can handle
of people who are trying to leave this movement. It’s very difficult
to get out once you’re in.
I think the other thing that’s worth exploring is the public racial
reconciliation process, which the United States has never under-
taken in any major scale, but smaller ones, around actions like the
1979 Greensboro shooting, which was a neo-Nazi and clan mas-
sacre of leftist demonstrators, after which the gunmen were acquit-
ted on State and Federal trial. Things like that truth in reconcili-
ation process have really created opportunities for local commu-
nities to reach these people and have dialogs that can lead people
out of this way of thinking.
Mr. WELCH. Okay. Thank you very much. I’m sorry I don’t have
time for more questions, but I really appreciate the panel.
I yield back.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much.
And we did have a witness in a prior hearing from Life After
Hate who testified also about the budget cuts that they had experi-
enced from the administration.
I come now to the gentlelady from Massachusetts, Ms. Pressley.
She’s recognized for five minutes.
Ms. PRESSLEY. There is concern—thank you, Mr. Chair.
There is concern amongst the civil rights community, that any
new counterism authorities or resources could be used against vul-
nerable groups when defining violent white supremacy as inter-
 33

national terrorism. We saw evidence of this in the aftermath of 9/

11 when there was an overreach by U.S. counterterrorism and law
enforcement agencies against Arab Americans, American Muslims,
and South Asian Americans.
Ms. Mulligan, are civil rights leaders and communities of color
right to be concerned about providing additional authorities to U.S.
national security agencies?
Ms. MULLIGAN. They are right to be concerned. And I think those
concern—oh, sorry to repeat myself. They are right to be concerned.
And I think that we can and should listen to those communities in
developing the solutions to the problem that we’re seeing today, not
only because those communities disproportionately suffer from vio-
lence at the hands of white supremacists, but also because, as
you’ve mentioned, they have lived experiences with government
counterterrorism efforts and have perspectives on what has and
has not worked.
One of the reasons that, in my testimony today, I don’t call for
an expansion of authorities is for the reasons that you suggest, but
the other reason is because there’s quite a lot that we can do with-
in the existing national security framework and set of authorities
to improve our response to this problem. And we can do that in
ways that don’t involve increasing surveillance, adding to watch
lists, or leveraging intelligence and information against Americans.
Ms. PRESSLEY. And that does not violate civil rights and civil lib-
erties?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Absolutely.
Ms. PRESSLEY. Okay. In August, we learned from a leaked 2018
FBI document that the FBI considered BIE, black identity extrem-
ists, to be as high a priority as white supremacy extremists, this
despite the fact that white supremacy extremists were responsible
for 39 murders in 2018, while BIEs, black identity extremists, were
responsible for approximately zero that same year.
Dr. Geltzer, do you agree with that FBI assessment?
Mr. GELTZER. I want FBI assessments to reflect reality and to re-
flect threats, and I don’t know what drove that one, but I do think
it’s—there’s a reason that having aggregate numbers like that
shared with, for example, Congress, is important, because it allows
Congress, in its important oversight function, to look at whether
the work that the Bureau is doing actually reflects deaths that are
being caused, attacks that are succeeding, or even attacks that are
being attempted. That strikes me as not intruding on the preroga-
tive of law enforcement to, in any particular investigation, do their
job, but it does allow folks who sit in this body to check in the ag-
gregate whether resources are being appropriately allocated. And it
seems, in fact, that those numbers have caused questions to be
asked, like the one you’re asking today.
So that strikes me as important in facilitating oversight that law
enforcement at that level needs.
Ms. PRESSLEY. And so further expounding upon that, Ms. Mul-
ligan, given that the FBI’s priorities, and again because of that ag-
gregate data, are proven to be sort of seriously askew in alignment
with what the actual threat is, what should Congress do to ensure
that other counterterrorism agencies do not similarly and unjustly
target minority communities?
 34

Ms. MULLIGAN. Well, I think first and foremost, the strategies

that are being developed, like the one that we’re told is coming out
today from the Department of Homeland Security, needs to identify
violent white supremacy as the current serious domestic threat
that it is. Part of what I think that Congress should also do is call
on the Director of National Intelligence to increase the priority of
violent white supremacists as a threat in the national intelligence
priorities framework.
I think, in the end, what we’re going to have to do is get better
data to better document what is happening to stop undercounting
the extent to which these crimes are being committed. And to do
that, I think the FBI is going to have to get better than it currently
is at enforcing its own regulations about how these things are
counted.
Ms. PRESSLEY. Very good. And then, you know, for those that—
for protesters, so, for example, after the J20 protests during
Trump’s inauguration, more than 200 people were arrested, even
though the vast majority of those charges were dropped due to a
lack of evidence. The civil rights community is also concerned about
other progressive groups being the target of law enforcement over-
reach.
So, Dr. Geltzer, what protections can we put in place to make
sure that efforts to counter white supremist terrorists are directed
at the right groups and are not unjustly expanded?
Mr. GELTZER. It’s a critical question you ask, and it applies re-
gardless of what authorities, of course, law enforcement might be
invoking, whether it’s existing terrorism laws, new terrorism laws,
hate crime statute. Whatever the statute, I don’t want to see, and
I don’t think colleagues I used to work with at the Justice Depart-
ment want to see that abused or exploited to intrude on political
advocacy that’s protected. I think that’s where you have internal
checks within these entities, not only guidelines in place, like the
DIOG that guides the FBI’s work, but you have internal actors,
like inspectors general. You then have the role of Congress, again
at the aggregate level, not in particular investigations, but at the
aggregate level, providing a check. And there might be a role for
entities like the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an
independent agency within the executive branch, to look at use of
counterterrorism authorities to provide additional check and over-
sight.
Ms. PRESSLEY. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. RASKIN. The gentlelady’s time is expired. Thank you very
much.
And the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Jordan, is recognized for five
minutes.
Mr. JORDAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just want to thank our witnesses for being here today, espe-
cially Ms. Owens for coming. I apologize I couldn’t be here for some
of the earlier parts of the hearing. I had an amendment on the
floor that we were managing. But I did walk in a few minutes ago,
and Mr. Meadows and I were visiting in the back room, and noticed
that, Ms. Owens, you hadn’t spoke for a while. So if there’s some-
thing you’d like to add to the discussion over the last few minutes,
I’d be happy to yield my four minutes to you and let you comment.
 35

But thank you again for your outstanding testimony, for being here
as our witness today.
Ms. OWENS. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. I was just
commenting back stage—I mean, back behind the chambers, that
it is quite ironic that I’m the only black American that’s sitting
here, and yet the people that called this hearing haven’t asked me
a single question about my experience. I think that probably points
to what I say the larger issue is, is that Democrats come up with
the problems, they come up with the solutions, and black Ameri-
cans are basically used as props for them to get out their narrative,
and to ultimately control our vote using fear tactics.
I also found it quite hilarious that when asked for actual num-
bers, nobody here could actually provide them, because it’s not ac-
tually a problem in America or a major problem or a threat that’s
facing black America. This is, again, just election rhetoric. This is,
again, just attempt to assault an administration that is doing all
that they can to help black America in every single regard, whether
it’s criminal justice reform, whether it’s talking about real issues
like school choice, which should be implemented to conquer some
of these illiteracy rates that are actually harming the black com-
munity.
And I think it’s unfortunate that we have this many hearings on
something that is so small in America, and we aren’t having real
hearings. I actually don’t think the Democrats have completed a
single day of real work since Donald J. Trump went into office.
This has just been about attacking his administration day in and
day out with things that do not matter.
I am hopeful that we will come to a point where we actually have
hearings about things that matter in America, things that are a
threat to America, like illegal immigration, which is a threat to
black America, like socialism, which is a threat to every single
American, and I hope that we see that day. It’s definitely not going
to be today.
Fortunately, we have Republicans that are fighting every single
day, day in and day out, and I will wrap this up by saying what
I said at the beginning of my testimony, which is that for all of the
Democrat colleagues that are hoping that this is going to work, and
that we’re going to have a fearful black America at the polls, if
you’re paying attention to the stuff that I’m paying attention to,
the conversation is cracking. People are getting tired of this rhet-
oric. We’re tired that we’re being told by you guys to hate people
based on the color of their skin or to be fearful. We want results.
We want policies. We’re tired of rhetoric.
And the numbers show that white supremacy and white nation-
alism is not a problem that is harming black America. Let’s start
talking about putting fathers back in the home. Let’s start talking
about God and religion and shrinking government, because govern-
ment has destroyed black American homes, and every single one of
you know that, and I think many people should feel ashamed for
what we have done and what Congress has turned in to. It’s Days
of Our Lives in here, and it’s embarrassing.
Mr. JORDAN. I thank the lady for her comments and Ms. Owens,
thank you for being here today as our witness.
And with that, I would yield back the balance of my time.
 36

Mr. RASKIN. I thank the gentleman. Has everyone gone here, Mr.
Meadows? Okay. Well, I definitely want to take a few more min-
utes and anyone else who has closing thoughts or questions. I’m
going to invite them to do it. Obviously, I resist the suggestion that
our hearing is something that doesn’t matter, and that it’s some-
how a distraction from truly important business. The title of our
hearing is ‘‘Confronting Violent White Supremacy, Addressing the
Transnational Terrorist Threat.’’ Let me just quickly ask the other
witnesses to respond. Would you say that this is something that
does not matter? I know that you are all professional experts on
the subject and have devoted your careers to it. How do you re-
spond to the idea that this is something that doesn’t matter com-
pared to God and religion, for example, which were offered? Dr.
Geltzer?
Mr. GELTZER. Well, as somebody who once had counterterrorism
in my title, I obviously think that any form of violence extremism
matters, and part of what makes terrorism so distinctive is that
whatever the numbers might be about those killed in particular at-
tacks, obviously tragic for those people, but terrorism has an out-
side effect, it transcends those numbers. It leads to political back-
lash at times. It divides communities. It polarizes. That’s why
many of us who work on terrorism and counterterrorism think that
it can’t be reduced to the numbers killed. Those are acts of tragedy
in and of themselves. But it’s that idea that taking whatever your
view of political goals and pursuing it through violence, that’s dis-
ruptive to society as we know it, and that’s why I think it’s an im-
portant conversation we’re having.
Mr. RASKIN. Well, thank you for that point. I mean, I suppose
someone could look at the casualties that our Nation experienced
at 9/11, and say that was smaller than the total number of people
killed in gun violence or in drunk driving that year, but that
doesn’t capture the political, the social, the emotional, the inter-
personal reality of an act of terrorism. Dr. Belew, what is your re-
sponse to the idea that it’s something that doesn’t really matter?
Ms. BELEW. Well, we have a history of treating it like it doesn’t
matter, and the result of that has been death and destruction, and
the disruption of all kinds of peoples’ lives. I suppose I would point
to kind of two historical examples to understand this a little bit
better. One is this idea that it’s hilarious, my co-panelist says that
there are no numbers; that their numbers show, she says, that this
is not a problem, and she points out that none of us give the num-
bers.
I’d like to talk for a minute about why we don’t have the num-
bers, if I may. From the outset, surveillance in the United States
has been a profoundly political project, so we can go all the way
back to the 1960’s and think about how things like the FBI coun-
terintelligence program were unequally targeted. COINTELPRO,
people in this room might know, was a project that sought to dis-
rupt fringe activism on both the left and the right. But we know
from the history that it was profoundly more focused on the left
and on activists of color than on the right. So Klan groups were in-
filtrated, but there were no deaths of Klan activists in this period
at the hands of FBI informants. Nor was there a cohesive effort to
disrupt those groups the way that there was on the left.
 37

Similarly, our resources have been overwhelmingly dedicated to

confronting Islamic or international terror rather than white or do-
mestic terror. The reason we don’t have these numbers is because
there hasn’t been an aggregating data project within the Federal
Government. The watchdogs that have been in charge of aggre-
gating this data have had their own motivations and their own rea-
sons for using different kinds of data collection practices.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to the use of your
word ‘‘hilarious.’’ To me, this feels a lot like your reaction to being
named in one of these manifestos. Now, you’re, of course, not re-
sponsible for the words of somebody writing that document, but I
do think that laughing at it is a real problem, because these are
real families that are impacted by this violence, and I think our ef-
forts toward talking about this have to start from a place of mutual
respect, which is what I’ve heard from this side of the table. Now
the reason we don’t have those numbers, I want those numbers as
much as you do, but the number—to say the numbers don’t show
something is simply not supported by the data.
Mr. RASKIN. Okay. And I have 38 seconds left. Ms. Mulligan, if
you can—if you want to respond within that time.
Ms. MULLIGAN. The only thing I would add is that it’s in the
name, terrorism, domestic terrorism. It terrorizes us. It terrorizes
us in our homes, it terrorizes us in our schools, and to the points
made by the other panelists, it is disproportionate to its impact on
any individual life, and it’s not——
Mr. RASKIN. You reject the idea it’s something that doesn’t mat-
ter or doesn’t really matter?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Absolutely reject.
Mr. RASKIN. Okay. So here’s where we are, every member now
has had five minutes——
Mr. MEADOWS. I’ll go ahead and claim my five minutes.
Mr. RASKIN. Okay. So we have two members who have not. So
I’m going to go to the two members who have not yet and we’ll give
an opportunity for a closing thought to any member who wants be-
fore we go.
Mr. JORDAN. Am I next to respond or is Mr. Meadows?
Mr. RASKIN. I thought Mr. Meadows. Mr. Meadows is next, then
Mr. Clay, then to you Mr. Jordan.
Mr. MEADOWS. Ms. Owens, obviously this is a gang-up on you,
you know. We’re giving these witnesses the ability to do a rebuttal
on you, and so, you know, I find it unfair, Ms. Belew. I mean, can-
didly, for you to show mutual respect and then you to go after Ms.
Owens is not appropriate. So Ms. Owens, you can have four min-
utes and 34 seconds to respond however you want.
Mr. JORDAN. Will the gentleman yield for a second?
Mr. MEADOWS. I’ll yield.
Mr. JORDAN. Thank you. I believe, Ms. Owens, when you used
the word ‘‘hilarious,’’ it was referencing the fact that no one had
asked you a question; it wasn’t to the subject matter of the hearing.
Is that right?
Ms. OWENS. That is correct.
Mr. JORDAN. And to have another witness insinuate something
that is not accurate is just not appropriate, Mr. Chairman, for how
witnesses are supposed to behave in front of this committee. I also
 38

think you didn’t say it doesn’t matter about the subject matter of
today’s hearing. You said there are other subjects that matter as
well, and maybe we should spend some time on those. Is that accu-
rate?
Ms. OWENS. That is correct, and they matter much, much, much,
much more, and I have said that. I said that in my opening and
I will say it again. You know that white supremacy and white na-
tionalism is nowhere near—ranks nowhere near the top of the
issues that are facing black America, and the reason that you are
bringing them up in this room is because it is an attempt to make
the election all about race as the Democrats——
Mr. RASKIN. Not in my case, Ms. Owens.
Ms. OWENS. Please don’t cut me off.
Mr. RASKIN. Please do not characterize my motives.
Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Chairman, it’s my time.
Mr. RASKIN. You got your time, Mr. Meadows. I’ll give you three
more seconds.
Ms. OWENS. Every four years, you bring up race and you knew
exactly what I meant when I said hilarious, and you just tried to
do live what the media does all the time to Republicans, to our
President, and to conservatives, which is you try to manipulate
what I said to fit your narrative. Okay? I was not referring to the
subject matter that is hilarious. I said it’s hilarious that we are sit-
ting in this room today, and I’ve got two doctors and a Mrs. and
nobody can give us real numbers that we can respond to so we can
assess how big of a threat this is, because you know that it is not
as big of a threat as you are trying to make it out to be so you can
manipulate.
And the audacity of you to bring up the Christchurch shooting
manifesto and make it seem as if I laughed at people that were
slaughtered by a homicidal maniac is, in my opinion, absolutely
despicable, and I think that we should be above that. To try to as-
sign reality or any meaning to a homicidal maniac writing a mani-
festo, which, by the way, let the record show also stated Spyro the
Dragon, the child’s cartoon, as a source of inspiration. He also cited
Nelson Mandela as a source of information. I don’t think that Nel-
son Mandela has inspired mosque shootings. You can correct me if
you think I’m wrong.
You would rather assign meaning to a homicidal maniac than to
actually address what I said—the things that I said today that are
actually harming black America. No. 1, father absence. No. 2, the
education system and the illiteracy rate. Illegal immigration ranks
high, abortion ranks high. White supremacy and white nation-
alism, if I had to make a list again of 100 things, would not be on
it.
This hearing, in my opinion, is a farce, and it is ironic that you’re
sitting here and you’re having three Caucasian people testify and
tell you what their expertise are. Do I know what my expertise
are? Black in America. I’ve been black in America my whole life,
all 30 years, and I can tell you that you guys have done the exact
same thing every four years ahead of an election cycle and it needs
to stop.
Mr. MEADOWS. I’ll yield back.
 39

Mr. RASKIN. Thank you, Mr. Meadows. And now we go to Mr.

Clay for five minutes.
Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I have no questions
for Ms. Owens, but I will ask the other witnesses who may be able
to shed some light on this. Two months after the terrorist attack
in Christchurch, which was live-streamed on Facebook for a full 17
minutes, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and French
President Emmanuel Macron brought together heads of state and
leaders from the private sector to adopt the Christchurch call.
The Christchurch call is a commitment by governments and tech-
nology companies to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist con-
tent online. It outlines collective voluntary commitments from gov-
ernments and online service providers to prevent the abuse of the
internet as occurred during and after the Christchurch attacks.
Some of these commitments include government enforcement of ap-
plicable laws that prohibit the production or dissemination of ter-
rorist and violent extremist content, and industry commitments to
take transparent specific measure to prevent the upload of terrorist
and violent extremist content onto social media platforms and to
prevent its dissemination.
Australia, Canada, European Commission, France, Germany, In-
donesia, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Senegal, Spain, the United Kingdom,
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube, Daily Mo-
tion, and Quant all signed on to the agreement. The United States
did not. In a statement, the White House declared: While the
United States is not currently in a position to join the endorse-
ment, we continue to support the overall goals reflected in the call.
Dr. Geltzer, what message do you think it sends to white su-
premacists and the world that the United States would not sign on
to the Christchurch agreement?
Mr. GELTZER. I think that was disappointing, Congressman Clay.
I would urge the United States to take another look at that, espe-
cially with upcoming in New York at the U.N. General Assembly,
upcoming conversations among the countries that did sign it. I
think that would make for an excellent opportunity to show the
United States’ own commitment to that agreement.
In fairness, our country has a different Constitution. We do have
a First Amendment, but by my read of that call, the keyword that
you used, Congressman Clay, of voluntary interaction strikes me as
falling on the constitutional side of what the government would be
signing up to do, to urge, inform, but not demand of tech companies
that certain content be taken down. That strikes me as within the
realm that protects constitutional rights that I take very seriously.
But at the same time, would show a commitment to addressing this
issue.
Mr. CLAY. Thank you for that response. Ms. Mulligan, is there
more that the United States as well as the private sector can do
to prevent the internet from being an incubator for extremist con-
tent?
Ms. MULLIGAN. Thank you for the question, Mr. Clay. I think
there’s a lot more that the government can do, and as for the pri-
vate sector, I both think that there’s more that they can do, and
I’m also a bit reticent to think that they are best positioned to
 40

make the kinds of policy decisions and tradeoffs that need to be

made. On the Federal Government side, I think that there’s more
that the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, the intel-
ligence community, and the National Counterterrorism Center can
do, and I would call on the National Security Council staff to ac-
tively implement last year’s national strategy for counterterrorism,
which identifies domestic terrorism as a major threat.
Mr. CLAY. Do you think the Christchurch call sufficiently pro-
tects First Amendment rights?
Ms. MULLIGAN. I agree with the comments that were made by
my co-panelist, Dr. Geltzer, that there’s an important tension
there, and we ought to be mindful of it. I think whatever we do
in the encountering violent white supremacy or any type of threat
needs to be mindful of our Constitution and our First Amendment,
but there is an important difference between the types of ideas that
lead to violence, and the types of ideas that we’re comfortable with
people holding.
Mr. CLAY. Thank you for your responses.
And I yield back.
Mr. RASKIN. Thank you, Mr. Clay. I want to thank all of our wit-
nesses for coming and participating in an incredibly substantive
and effective elucidation of the problem of the transnational terror
threat. We learned a lot. This is going to be very useful to the de-
liberations of the committee, and it was a lively discussion, and I
want to thank all of our guests who came with us and we are going
to adjourn at this point. You have—there will be five days within
which members can request followup questions from you. Is there
anything else? And the meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:14 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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