404 Media reports the Department of Justice has taken down a study showing white supremacist and far-right violence outpaces “all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.
The DOJ website hosted the study, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, until September 12, 2025.
In its place is the message: “The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
The report What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism revealed that “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
The document reports “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” since 1990, “including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”
In this same period, the report claimed, “far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
“We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently,” writes 404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg, “but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the ‘radical left.’”
California Rep. Jimmy Gomez said the halls of Congress had already been hostile before the previous president incited his white insurrectionist supporters to violently storm the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election one year ago today.
The Oversight and Reform vice-chair told Newsweek that the House was amid a vote on the Build Back Better bill last November when he was verbally accosted in an elevator by an unmasked Republican legislator. "You people are ruining the fucking country,” he said Texas Rep. Roger Williams told him. “Gomez, who is Mexican-American, was taken aback,” Newsweekreported. Williams, meanwhile, voted to overturn democracy and against the impeachment of the disgraced former president.
“Every member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) inside the building during the attack who spoke with Newsweek thought it would be the last day of their life,” the report said leading into the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. Gomez said that even as he considered ways to look like less of a target to the insurrectionists—such as removing his Congressional pin and jacket—he could not allow himself to just run away. “So he began helping lawmakers who were older and couldn't move as quickly as he could,” the report continued.
California’s Nanette Baragán told Newsweek that she had similar intuition to hide her pin. But other things could not be so easily hidden.
"The part that is not often spoken of is the fear members of Congress of color had," she said in the report. "When you're a person of color and a member of Congress, the thought on that day was ‘hide your pin, I'm not white, I'm going to be a target.’ That was something that was really real."
It wasn’t just members of the Hispanic Caucus, either. “One year after Jan. 6, Sarah Groh, Representative Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff, still does not know what happened to the panic buttons torn from their office,” Boston Globe’s Jazmine Ulloa tweeted earlier this week. “It’s one of many details still under investigation, and a memory that continues to haunt her.”
Ulloa writes in her piece that the U.S. Capitol is also a workplace for janitors and food service workers. Some of these workers, notably Black janitors, had to clean up the mess created by white insurrectionists.
For Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar, the insurrection brought back terrible memories of the white supremacist mass shooting that shook El Paso in 2019. In tweets immediately after the insurrection, she wrote that the terrorists “not only breached the Capitol and got into Statuary Hall, but they were banging on the locked doors of the House Chamber as we were told by Capitol Police to get down on our knees.”
In his House testimony last July, U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell recalled how he also had his life threatened by racist insurrectionists.
“I was at the front line and apparently, even through my mask, they saw my skin color and said, ‘You’re not even an American,’” the Latino U.S. military veteran told legislators. Naturalized as an American citizen more than two decades ago, Gonell said insurrectionists “called me traitor, a disgrace and that I, an Army veteran and a police officer, should be executed.”
"This wasn't a group of tourists. This was an armed insurrection,” President Biden said during stirring remarks on Thursday. “They weren't looking to uphold an election. They were here to overturn one."
In a statement Thursday, Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego said that “if we want to keep our democracy intact, then we must bring to justice those responsible for Jan. 6th, including everyone from those who laid siege to the building to those who sat idle in the White House or in Congress as their plans came to fruition. He urged the passage of pro-democracy legislation including the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. “To do so is not a partisan or political issue—it is the bare minimum we must do if we want to keep our democracy.”
The politics of eliminationism—in which ordinary democratic discourse is replaced by the constant drumbeat of demonization that depicts one's political opponents as inhuman objects fit only for extermination—has been growing steadily in America for well over a decade, reaching a fever pitch during Donald Trump's tenure in the White House.
But now, in the post-Trump era, his rabid fans have ripped off the mask of plausible deniability and are now openly calling for killing liberals and Trump critics—which includes anyone who believes he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Much of this toxic discourse is occurring in the more extreme corners of the internet, but on Monday at a "Critical Racism Tour" event in Nampa, Idaho, it was blurted out into the open when an audience member asked Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk: "When do we get to use the guns? … How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?" Kirk replied with a nondenunciation denunciation, warning that such talk is "playing into their hands," but then saying that the query was just "overly blunt" and agreeing that "we are living under fascism."
'When do we get to start using the guns?' questioner at TPUSA event asks Charlie Kirkyoutu.be
The event, billed as "Exposing Critical Racism at Boise State University" but held on the campus of Northwest Nazarene University, was primarily focused on promoting the bogus critical race theory narrative that American right-wingers have been wielding as a pseudo-controversy to disrupt college campuses and school boards. Kirk was the featured speaker, and he took questions afterwards.
A bearded man who did not identify himself told Kirk he was going to ask him "something a little bit out of the ordinary," and then proceeded:
At this point, we're living under a corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? [Crowd whoops.] No, and I'm not, that's not a joke, I'm not saying it like that. I mean literally, where's the line? How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?
The crowd seemed mostly supportive of this view, so Kirk tried to calm them down:
KIRK: No, uh, hold on. Stop, hold on. I'm gonna denounce that and I'm gonna tell you why. Because you're playing into their plans, and they're trying to make you do this. That's okay … They are trying to provoke you and everyone here. They are trying to make you do something that will be violent, that will justify a takeover of our freedoms and liberties the likes of which we have never seen. We are close to have momentum to get this country back on a trajectory using the peaceful means that we have at us. So to answer your question—and I just think it's, you know, overly blunt—we have to be the ones that do not play into the violent aims and ambitions of the other side. They fear—let me say this very clearly—they fear us holding the line with self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings. They're the ones that are willing to use federal force against us. I know that people get fired up. We are living under fascism. We are living under this tyranny. But if you think for a second they're not wanting you to all of a sudden get to that next level, where all of a sudden they're going to say, 'We need Patriot Act 2.0.' If you think that Waco was bad, wait till you see what they want to do next. What I'm saying is that we have a very fragile balance right now in our current where we must exhaust every single peaceful mean possible. I will say this: Idaho has not even started to exercise the peaceful means of state sovereignty against the federal government. Not even close. I'll give you five things Idaho could do right now.
Kirk then went on to suggest that Idaho's governor should announce that there would be no coronavirus-related vaccine or mask mandates. (In fact, Gov. Brad Little is publicly fighting the federal vaccine mandate in court, though states' options to do so are extremely limited under the law.) He also suggested that the legislature announce it was going to choose which federal laws apply to the state—something that, again, Idaho legislators are already doing, though predictably meeting with futility.
His main suggestion, however, was for the state government to inform the federal entities managing the state's federal lands that "you're out of the state of Idaho, we're managing our own lands." This is in fact an old idea in Idaho, dating back at least to the days of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and '80s.
There was a recent push for this idea—the Idaho Legislature in 2013 passed a resolution demanding the federal government "immediately transfer title to all public lands" to the state government. Other states, like Utah, tried following suit. But by 2017, but it had run aground on the shores of cold hard reality: Some 32.6 million acres out of 52.9 million of Idaho's total land is owned by the federal government.
Moreover, because these are mostly heavily forested wildlands that over the past decade have been beset by drought and a resulting plague of wildfires, the costs of managing these lands is prohibitive for a small state like Idaho. Then-Gov. Butch Otter attacked the idea, citing the 2015 fire season—in which fires burned 740,000 acres in the state to the tune of $300 million, the cost of which was mostly picked up by the federal government—as a recent example: "If the feds weren't there to pay for it … you'd blow a huge hole in the state budget," Otter's press secretary explained.
Perhaps even more relevant is the fact that Idaho can't claim ownership of federal lands under the legislation by which it was admitted to the union in 1890. The state also currently receives some $2.3 billion annually from the federal government in its education endowment fund as compensation.
Kirk was more than oblivious to longtime realities in Idaho, though. His "denunciation" of the argument for killing liberals was not at any point a civil or moral one—Kirk clearly was sympathetic to the man's sentiments. Instead, it was purely tactical, calling violence "a mistake."
His interlocutor responded: "I just want to know, where is the line?"
KIRK: The line is when we exhaust every single one of our state ability to push back against what's happening. We haven't even started the process of having Idaho, or states like Idaho, get back to self-government as our founders envisioned. They gave us state sovereignty! What is the line? Look man, I think we're at the teetering edge of a regime that knows that good decent Americans are gonna get to the place where, like in the movie Network, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!' Right? Well guess what? Know that there's a deeper game at play. Understand the psychological warfare that's being played here. They're trying to animate you. They're trying to get you to do something that then justifies what they actually want to do. So what's the solution? We need to start to demand Idaho to be Idaho, and the federal government can stay out of Idaho for just about everything.
So Kirk's "denunciation" of the question amounted primarily to urging the audience to reel in their violence for the time being while proceeding to attack local and state governments when they fail to follow their extremist agenda. Even this solution contains an innate threat: We have seen how the right's "self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings" has played out on the ground—with barrages of threats, intimidation, and actual violence, including that directed at health care workers attempting to enforce pandemic mandates.
The impulse for eliminationist violence, moreover, is latent in all of this: Even if Kirk's audience takes his advice and bides their time, the threat remains intact to overthrow local authorities if they fail to enact their extremist ideas and displace reality—such as Joe Biden's election as president—with their conspiracy theories and disinformation. We already saw how that played out on the ground on Jan. 6 at the Capitol after the "Stop the Steal" rally, an event at which TPUSA was a major sponsor, providing seven buses carrying 350 people.
If right-wing propagandists like Charlie Kirk and his army of devoted followers have their way, that scenario will be playing out again. But the next time, if the eliminationist extremism of his army's footsoldiers continues to fester, it may very well be with guns.
Far-right extremists over the years have adopted a number of flag designs as their representative banners. First it was the yellow "Don't Tread On Me" Gadsden flag flown by the Patriot movement and tea party. The alt-right came up with its Naziesque "Kekistan" banner. In the past few years, the prominent use of flags by belligerent far-right Trump fans, particularly those in "Trump Trains" or participating in right-wing invasions of urban liberal centers, has ranged from basic Trump or MAGA banners to "Blue Lives Matter" flags to their most recent "Fuck Biden" iterations.
Now, amid far-right protests against COVID-related vaccine and mask mandates, far-right extremists are unfurling their latest symbol: An all-black American flag, with stars and stripes mainly visible through variations in material and shading. "No quarter shall be given" is the black flag's traditional message—and in the context of the building drumbeat of right-wing "civil war" talk, a deeply ominous one. People flying them are essentially signaling that they're prepared to kill their liberal neighbors.
The black flags have been showing up at various right-wing protests, such as last weekend's "Health Freedom Rally" in Spokane, Washington—really a low-turnout affair mainly comprised of anti-vaccination protesters standing on a street corner, waving flags. One of these was a black American flag. Another one turned up when the protest moved to Riverfront Park.
The same flags have been showing up on people's home flag displays as well, as Michelle Davis of Living Blue Texas observed in a post headlined, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning On Killing You?" Primarily, videos of people erecting these flags on the fronts of their homes are being widely shared on social media, particularly TikTok and Facebook; Davis reported finding hundreds of them.
Black flags have a particular historical meaning for Americans: They first appeared on Civil War battlegrounds, carried by some Confederate Army units, and symbolizing the intent of the soldiers to neither seek any quarter nor give any—essentially, the opposite of the white flag of surrender, signifying that enemy combatants are to be killed rather than taken prisoner. It's a vow to massacre their enemies.
The people posting the "black flag" videos on TikTok appear primarily to use two different pieces of music as accompaniment: The first, "Raise the Colors," is a gloomy sea shanty from Pirates of the Caribbean 2; the second, the song God We Need You Now by country rapper Struggle Jennings and cowriter Caitlynne Curtis, features QAnon-derived lyrics that threaten retribution for the people who "desecrate" the "values of our country and our God":
We've been dancing with the devil way too long I know it's fun but get ready to pay your dues Oh God, come back home This crazy world is filled with liars and abusers We need you now before we're too far gone I hope one day they finally see the truth God, we need you now
Davis noted that the same right-wing channels where the black flag-raisings are being posted are similarly rife with "patriots" advising their cohorts to prepare for a civil war. "Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated," she notes. "So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us."
Their primary grievance appears currently to revolve around COVID restrictions, with a number of military members talking about their imminent discharges for refusing to be vaccinated.
"The biggest message they have been sending out is, 'it's time' or 'the time is now'," Davis notes. "They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram."
Some of the people posting videos of black flag hangings appear to be police officers, including one from Pea Ridge, Arkansas, who takes pains to carefully fold and unfold both his ordinary American flag and his all-black version. Several "black flag" groups have already formed on Facebook, and some Twitter accounts, such as the Michigan-based "Great Lakes Black Flag Coalition" ("Our mission is to unite Liberty minded organizations, communities and individuals for the purpose of promoting and restoring Freedom") specifically reference the symbol.
American far-right extremists have fantasized about embarking on a "second civil war" for several decades now, but the idea began building in intensity during the tea party years, when militia groups like the "Three Percenters"—whose name references its members' desire to embark on a "second American Revolution"—began attracting significant numbers of participants. It began gaining real traction during Donald Trump's tenure as president, mainly through the growth of such phenomena as the "Boogaloo" movement, which is specifically focused on preparing for a civil war.
Trump himself encouraged this narrative by threatening to unleash a civil war if Congress dared to impeach him, which sparked a wave of fevered preparations among his "patriot" fans in the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters and similar far-right groups. When it became apparent late in the 2020 campaign that he was likely headed for defeat at the polls, the civil-war discussions became intense, particularly among militia groups and white nationalists who were engaged in street-brawling protests, and "Boogaloo" activists tried leveraging street protests as opportunities for violence. Terrorism experts warned even then that fanatical Trump supporters were likely to engage in acts of mass violence.
This same, faux-patriotic worldview is what eventually inspired the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which was the apotheosis of the GOP's two-decades-and-longer descent into right-wing authoritarianism, fueled by eliminationist hate talk, reality-bereft conspiracist sedition, anti-democratic rhetoric and politics, and the full-throated embrace under Trump of the politics of intimidation and thuggery. There was a reason the insurrectionists believed they were all partaking of a "1776 moment": they envisioned themselves as heroic patriots saving America from the commies.
If anyone believes the radicalized American right's drive to push the nation into bloody civil strife was somehow expiated or exhausted that day, they only need check the presence of black American flags the next time there is a right-wing protest in their town. Or maybe they can just check the front porches in their neighborhoods.
