-Domestic terrorism from white supremacists is the most lethal
terrorist threat in the homeland.
-Why is the radical right growing?
Why are these ideas resurging in such a dramatic way?
- We've been unwilling to really grapple with our history.
We have to understand where this problem has
been in the past and what's kept us from addressing it.
-These groups have incubated unchallenged by the federal
government.
-People who are willing to carry out mass murders are the products of a
movement that has been growing for 40 or 50 years.
They see themselves as heroes, as
defenders of the race.
[Gunshots] [Gunshots]
[Gunshots]
[Dial Tone]
-I get a call from my mother.
And she’s whispering, “I’m in the closet.
We’re safe.
Try to call your dad, see if he’s all right.”
And then I’m asking her questions.
Like, is the person still shooting?
Can you hear the shots?
Can you, what’s going on?
And she didn’t, she kind of hangs up and says, “I can’t talk.
I don’t want to, I don’t want to give away
our hiding spot.”
-Shortly after that, I get a phone call from my father’s phone, expecting
to hear my father’s voice.
What I hear is another priest inside, who
picked up the phone and said, “Hey, we need help.
People are bleeding.”
[Sirens] [Police Radio Chatter]
[Gunshots]
-I realize I’m going to be the first one there.
I enter the lot, and it looked like there was one person down.
Checked on, um, him.
It was obvious he was dead.
This guy was shooting everybody.
He comes out of the temple and I could see a gun.
He raises it up, I raise mine, and we shoot from about 40 yards away.
I missed and his shot hit me right in the face
-We have one officer shot.
-And in the end, I take 15 shots.
[Gunshot] -My backup, Sam Lenda, came.
[Shouting] -Sam shot him, he went down and,
in less than a minute, killed himself.
-Police focused their investigation on this man, Wade Michael Page.
-A military vet believed to be a white supremacist.
-These are all the pictures of everyone that lost their lives.
My father had been shot five times from close range and didn’t make it.
Seven people altogether died.
This became the deadliest hate crime
committed at a place of worship by an affiliated white supremacist in
nearly 50 years.
-We held the first hearing on this terrible, violent attack.
We've got to bring these issues before the public.
They have to see them in real terms.
Since 9/11, Congress has held dozens of briefings on the threat
posed by Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
This is the first hearing in many years on the threat of violent
domestic extremism.
-I was asked if I would testify before Congress about the domestic
extremist threat.
My message was, this threat is real and it is growing.
Our failure to act now will assuredly embolden the enemy and
bring more attacks.
The disheartening thing was Dick Durbin, for the first 20 to 30
minutes, was the lone senator attending.
No Republicans attended.
-Sadly, the shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was not an
isolated incident.
I don't think people took it as seriously as they should have.
It's spreading.
And that's something we didn't want to hear.
-The overwhelming majority of the counterterrorism focus then was still
on the international terrorism side, in part because of the scale and
scope of the threats.
From there, things really started to change in
terms of this uptick in lethal attacks in the United States.
-The nation is waking up to news of a senseless act of violence in
Charleston, South Carolina.
-One of the deadliest attacks against a Black church in U.S. history.
-Dylann Roof charged with nine counts of murder.
He is not charged with domestic terrorism.
-Even though there was this horrific attack, no one was calling it
domestic terrorism.
-F.B.I. Director James Comey says that he does not believe that
Dylann Roof’s actions were terrorism, because of how it is defined under
the law.
-These types of incidents weren't just run-of-the-mill crimes.
-It happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue.
-Bowers hurled words of hate against Jews as he murdered them.
-Here in El Paso tonight, a gunman showing up at a Walmart.
-Police say a racist manifesto criticized a growing Hispanic
population.
-He thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants.
-The idea that whites are under threat is probably the single most
important thing driving the really dramatic expansion of the radical
right.
Among some, it's the Jews who are trying to replace us
white people.
Uh, other places, it is Black people who are trying to replace us
white people.
Wade Page had a tattoo of the 14 Words.
“We must ensure an existence for white
people and a future for white children,” a slogan that was coined
by a principal member of The Order, part of the hit team that
murdered the Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.
And this has become an incredibly central
slogan, uh, for the radical right in the United States.
Wade Michael Page, Dylann Roof are the products
of a movement that has been growing for 40 or 50 years.
-Potentially, we could have gotten ahead of some of these threats.
Or at least called them something else.
That would have given a different context to the threat and perhaps
led to different decisions about what to do.
But we didn't, and we're left with the situation we're in now.
[Music]
-There's still lingering effects on, on
not only me, my family.
Like, this can happen anywhere.
This can happen to anyone.
This can happen at any time.
-There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened
that day, not a single day.
So this is the first shot.
If the shooter had been a Muslim, if the shooter had been brown and if
the communities inside were white, if they were Christian, if they were
part of the mainstream of what we deem as valuable,
would it have been different?
And I think that 10 years later I still struggle
with, is our pain enough?
Since the shooting on August 5th, we’ve worked in the
extremism prevention field for, now, almost 10 years.
We know that the biggest threat is the homegrown
terrorist, and what is happening right now is that we do not have the
infrastructure laid to actually address that.
There's lots of Wade Michael Pages out there, so we
better start understanding the dynamic.