It warned of a surge in activity by right-wing groups, including militias, white supremacists, anti-government activists and others motivated by racial grievances toward the nation’s first black president and the consequences of a faltering economy.
Nearly eight years later, Johnson’s warnings have proved prescient in a string of incidents including the killings of a Kansas abortion doctor and a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and mass shootings at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and an African-American church in South Carolina.
Last week, a foiled alleged plot by three men to attack an apartment complex inhabited by Muslim Somali immigrants in western Kansas further demonstrated that it isn’t just foreign terrorists or those sympathetic to them that Americans have to worry about.
Three Kansas men — Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright and Patrick Stein — were indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday on one count of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. The three are accused of plotting to detonate truck bombs around the complex in Garden City, Kansas, where 120 people live and worship.
The FBI arrested the men last Friday in Liberal, Kan., after an undercover investigation.
According to a complaint filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kansas, the men belonged to a militia group called the Crusaders, known for its anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-government views.
The group referred to the Somali immigrants, who work at a local meatpacking plant, as “cockroaches,” the complaint said.
The men had discussed using rocket-propelled grenades to attack the complex, proposed dipping bullets in pigs’ blood and considered using something like the fertilizer-and-fuel-oil combination that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, according to the complaint.
“I’ll blow every goddamn building up right there,” Stein allegedly said.
The three talked about attacking area churches that supported the Somali migrants, according to the complaint, and said they wouldn’t even spare the children any mercy.
“The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim,” Stein allegedly said.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of extremist groups, the number of anti-Muslim hate groups has increased 42 percent since 2014.
“This is just symptomatic of the really unprecedented rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in our society,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Hooper and others say the federal government’s focus on terrorism from abroad, or domestic terrorism carried out by people sympathetic to foreign terrorist groups, diverts attention from threats against Muslims.
“The attitude seems to be it cannot be terrorism unless a Muslim commits an act of violence,” he said.
Hooper said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had fueled anti-Muslim bias by calling for, among other things, prohibiting Muslims from entering the country and widespread surveillance of mosques.
“All of this stuff adds up,” he said.
The suspects in Kansas allegedly planned to carry out their attack Nov. 9 — the day after Election Day. Trump’s campaign has struggled in recent weeks, and he’s fallen behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in the polls.
“The militia and anti-government types are using the election to recruit more people and fuel more paranoia,” Johnson said.
Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said its mission involved protecting the country from a wide range of threats, including domestic ones.
Earlier this year, the department formed the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which involved Homeland Security, the FBI, the Justice Department and the National Counterterrorism Center.
Christensen said the department had proposed $10 million in grants to help communities counter violent extremism.
There is no foolproof way to predict and stop terrorist attacks. For example, authorities could not the Boston marathon bombing in 2013 or this year’s attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
After Omar Mateen killed 49 people in June at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, FBI Director James Comey said investigators had known of him. Though they interviewed him twice, they couldn’t prove he had any ties to terrorist groups.
“Our work is very challenging,” Comey said in June. “We are looking for needles in a nationwide haystack, but we are also called up to figure out which pieces of hay might someday become needles. That is hard work. If we can find a way to do that better, we will.”
Extremist Attacks
2009: Anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder shoots and kills George Tiller, a Wichita, Kan., doctor who performed late-term abortions. Roeder is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
2009: Joseph Von Brunn, a neo-Nazi, shoots and kills Stephen Johns, a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Officers shoot and wound Von Brunn, and he dies while awaiting trial on murder charges.
2010: Joseph Andrew Stack, an anti-tax activist, flies a single-engine plane into an Internal Revenue Service office in Austin, Texas. Stack and an IRS employee are killed.
2010: Jerry Kane, a “sovereign citizen,” and his 16-year-old son kill two police officers in West Memphis, Ark.. They are killed in a shootout with police.
2011: White supremacist David Pedersen and his girlfriend, Holly Grigsby, are arrested and charged with killing his father and stepmother, a man they thought was Jewish and an African-American man.
2012: Wade Michael Page, an Army veteran affiliated with a racist skinhead group and a white-power band, opens fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., killing six. Page shoots and kills himself at the scene.
2014: Frazier Glenn Miller, an Army veteran and former Ku Klux Klan leader, shoots and kills three people at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Overland Park, Kan.
2015: Dylann Roof, who expressed sympathy for white supremacist causes, shoots and kills nine African-American churchgoers during a Bible study in Charleston, S.C. One of those who died was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator.
2015: John Russell Houser opens fire in a movie theater in Lafayette, La, killing two people. Houser was sympathetic to neo-Nazi groups, and had praised Adolf Hitler and David Duke.
2015: Anti-abortion activist Robert Lewis Dear opens fire on a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three people, including a University of Colorado police officer.
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center
©2016 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Visit the McClatchy Washington Bureau at www.mcclatchydc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
