Republicans: Downplaying the dangers of extremism only harms our troops

The April 13 arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, for espionage due to his leaking top secret documents, is yet another stark reminder of the danger far-right extremists pose to national security. But Republicans don’t seem to agree. 

In a reckless move this past summer, Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), shut down proposals to root out extremists even as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies were reporting that white supremacist and antigovernment movements are our number one domestic terrorism threat. 

SASC Republicans rejected efforts to identify and remove extremists from the ranks, citing bogus claims that this was somehow besmirching our troops. That narrative is outrageous and dangerous. Expunging extremism reduces insider threats like Teixeira, protects service members and enhances morale in our diverse forces and protects the public from domestic terrorist threats. It does not paint all of our brave troops as extreme. 

Teixeira released his documents on the gaming site Discord to an invitation-only group, Thug Shaker Central, that he managed. There, he and a couple dozen of teenagers and young men traded in pro-gun and racist materials. A shared video reportedly showed Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle. Teixeira reportedly has a long history of making comments some of his fellow high school students perceived as racist and showed up for school after a 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting wearing a shirt depicting an AR-15 assault-style rifle. According to one story, a social-media account run by a former U.S. Navy noncommissioned officer who is pro-Russian was key to the spread of the leaked documents.

Teixeira isn’t the only recent extremist case. 

In February, Brandon Russell, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen and former Army National Guardsman, was arrested for a plot to destroy Baltimore’s power grid. 

It was disclosed on April 14 that U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry, who was convicted this month of a 2020 murder of a racial justice protester and veteran, regularly expressed racist views and wished to shoot and kill activists. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) expressed the desire to pardon Perry’s conviction. 

Last year, a former paratrooper who allegedly enlisted in the army to become more proficient at killing Black people was given a security clearance, like Teixeira, despite his Nazi ideology and ties to white supremacists. 

Last summer, an active-duty Air Force sergeant was sentenced to 41 years in prison for the 2020 killing of a San Francisco deputy with the aim of launching a second civil war. 

Then there are the arrests of at least five active duty service members and about 80 veterans for their activities in the Jan. 6 insurrection, which aimed to stop a democratic transfer of power. 

In the last decade, an annual average of 24 Americans with military connections were convicted of a crime of violent extremism, minus the Jan. 6 defendants. That average is four times as high as in the previous decade. Last week’s anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the largest loss of life in a domestic terrorist attack, is a stark reminder of the problem. Timothy McVeigh was a disgruntled veteran active in both militia and white supremacist movements. 

There are many, many more examples.

With all this, you would think that no one in our federal government would treat the problem of extremism in the military as a nothing burger. But you’d be wrong. As the Biden administration and the Pentagon have been working to put in place programs to combat the extremist threat, the SASC this past summer issued a report that shockingly directed an immediate halt to efforts countering violent extremism within the military. The halt was approved 14-12, with all Democrats voting no and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) joining all Republicans to approve it. 

To justify this move, the report cited data from the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group (CEAWG), set up by Defense Secretary Austin in 2021 to tackle this problem. CEAWG found that one in every 21,000 service members, a small percentage, committed acts of prohibited violent extremism. For the SASC, this number was deemed insignificant, regardless of the outsized impact extremists in the military have in terms of terrorism, and the committee determined that too many resources were invested in the effort, citing about five and a half million military member hours (two hours per member) and $500,000 — a minuscule drop in the bucket of the defense budget. It said that “the case incident rate does not warrant a Department-wide effort on the issue” and that spending resources on this is an “inappropriate use of taxpayer funds and should be discontinued by the Department of Defense immediately.” 

The report had an impact. The final NDAA deleted seven of eight House-passed provisions pertaining to extremism. Most merely sought information about the threat posed by domestic terrorists and white supremacist or antisemitic organizations. The only provision that survived was a call to screen social media usage for extremist ties, but it was limited to foreign terrorist organizations and excluded domestic ones. 

As Lawfare reported this past February, “there is a significant lack of data, hampering policymakers’ ability to even understand how deeply rooted the problem may be.” The SASC’s moves mean much-needed and reliable data isn’t forthcoming. 

What is driving the inexplicable SASC position is the dangerous, bogus belief on the part of Republicans that addressing extremism is somehow an attack on those serving. The report read the “committee believes that the vast majority of servicemembers serve with honor and distinctions and the narrative surrounding systemic extremism in the military besmirches the men and women in uniform.”

This is absurd. Protecting our servicemembers and the public from extremists does not “besmirch” them. It protects them. Ignoring the problem means more insider threats like Teixeira, deadly acts of domestic terrorism and threats to our democracy are likely coming.

Heidi Beirich is chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and an expert on far-right and other extremist movements. Before her current role, Heidi led the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. She’s testified in front of Congress on the issue of rooting extremism from the military and reducing recruitment of veterans by extremist groups.