President Biden marked four years since the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by urging Americans not to ignore the ongoing threat posed by violent White supremacist extremists.
“We must acknowledge what America’s intelligence community has already confirmed, and what Charlottesville and so many other communities know all too well: The most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland in recent years has been domestic terrorism rooted in White supremacy,” Mr. Biden said in a statement Thursday. “We cannot ignore it. We must confront the spread of hate-fueled violence in every form.”
Jason Kessler, a self-described civil rights advocate from Charlottesville, organized the 2017 rally to protest the city’s plans to remove a long-standing monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Several prominent White supremacists were scheduled to speak at the protest, and it attracted far-right extremists from around the U.S., including neo-Nazis, White supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members.
Fights erupted between “Unite the Right” participants and counter-protesters before the event was even scheduled to begin, and it was quickly called off by authorities and a state of emergency declared.
James Alex Fields, a neo-Nazi who traveled from Ohio for the event, killed counter-protester Heather Heyer that afternoon by driving his car into a crowd of people. He was sentenced to life in prison.
President Trump faced condemnation in the aftermath of the rally for saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protest. Mr. Biden has said that comment prompted him to run for president.
Both the current and past administrations have stated in the years since that violent domestic extremists motivated by race or ethnicity, remain of particular concern.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, whom Mr. Trump appointed in 2017, testified two years after the rally that White supremacists and other violent extremists pose a “persistent, pervasive threat.”
More recently, a report issued under the Biden administration in March said officials assess racially or ethically motivated extremists still present among the “most lethal” threats to national security.
Among domestic violent extremists, racially or ethically motivated ones are “most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported.
Charlottesville removed its statue of Lee, who led troops against U.S. forces in a failed bid to uphold slavery, on July 10, nearly one month shy of the four-year anniversary of the protest.
Mr. Kessler, the architect of “Unite the Right,” said Thursday on Twitter the rally will be remembered as “the most significant sign there was resistance to the Cultural Revolution [and] replacement of White America.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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