White supremacist groups increasingly cross borders, sharing tactics and grievances. But the State Department has yet to designate any of them as an international terrorist organization. The neo-Nazi group Nordic Resistance Movement is big on media. It hosts a weekly podcast dubbed Nordic Frontier with a strong following among its members in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, along with like-minded listeners throughout Europe and the United States. The group bills the show as “the Final Solution to your podcast problem” — a twisted reference to the Holocaust. Last May, its featured guest was a Queens, New York, native named Rob Rundo. Rundo is the American white supremacist who co-founded the Rise Above Movement, a U.S.-based white supremacist group the FBI says rioted at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. When the Nordic Frontier host welcomed Rundo onto the show, he joked that the interview was “way overdue” because he’d been following Rundo and RAM members’ arrests since Charlottesville. A video broadcast online during the interview showed Rundo and RAM brothers “on tour,” weaving their way through many countries of Europe and visiting the Reichstag building in Berlin, scene of the infamous fire that played a role in the Nazis’ rise to power. The show’s host, Andreas Johansson, lamented how the Covid-19 pandemic had made it more difficult for extremists across Europe to march together. Rundo heartily agreed: “More networking, more meeting up again, because this is all a one-people-one-struggle type of thing.”
The podcast is, in itself, proof of the growing internationalization of white supremacy, and how even proudly nationalistic groups in different countries reinforce each other’s grievances. The sense that white people are under siege in multiple countries fuels the global movement with fresh conspiracies while creating a sense of white brotherhood. Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, said he was inspired by American white supremacist Dylann Roof and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. Tarrant himself was then hailed by American mass murderers who attacked a California synagogue and killed 22 people, mostly Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, in El Paso, Texas. For his part, Rundo is just one of many American white supremacists to appear on Nordic Frontier in recent years, underscoring how European identitarians are increasingly radicalizing, and being radicalized by, American white supremacists. The cross-border reach of the American white supremacist movement and its use of violence is especially concerning to some law enforcement experts who say the Biden administration is failing to utilize the most powerful tool in its legal arsenal to enable law enforcement to monitor hate groups more closely. Under U.S. law, foreign white supremacist groups can be designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and providing “material support” to such groups is a federal crime. To be designated an FTO, a group must be foreign; it must threaten the security of the US or US nationals; and it must participate in terrorist activity or have the capability and intent to commit terrorism, according to the State Department. Designating groups such as the Nordic Resistance Movement as foreign terrorist organizations would, paradoxically, give the FBI new tools to combat violent threats from domestic extremists. (…) The Biden administration recently released an anti-domestic terrorism strategy that won praise from counterterrorism experts, but many noted in frustration that it does not provide any recommendations for new legal authority to crack down on domestic terrorists. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection in the US Capitol, many say, more legal tools are urgently needed for a law enforcement apparatus that is just now catching up to the threat posed by white supremacists and far-right extremists. Biden’s top science adviser bullied and demeaned subordinates, according to White House investigation. In September, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee that since the spring of 2020 the bureau had more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload, from about a thousand to around 2,700 investigations. But the Biden administration has not addressed the white-supremacy threat through designations, despite a growing chorus of calls for them to do so.
via politico: Is Biden Ignoring a Key Tool to Combat Violent Extremists?
