Experts warn of growing threat of online extremism and political polarization in the United States

ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans underscores how online extremism and political divisions in the country have created ‘a perfect storm’ for radicalization in America, experts say, forces the order struggling to keep up with an increasingly fragmented threat.

Finding and accessing extremist communities online has never been easier, the threat has never been greater and the ideology of those carrying out attacks has never been more fragmented, experts say.

“The FBI and law enforcement in general currently face a threat landscape that is both diverse and complex,” said Seamus Hughes, senior fellow and policy associate at the National Center for Innovation, Technology and Intelligence. counterterrorism education from the University. of Nebraska-Omaha. “It makes things a little more difficult for law enforcement.”

“We have a level of polarization in the United States that is a big factor,” he said. “The online environment has algorithms set up to make you angry. And all of this is part of a perfect storm of factors that are leading to increased radicalization.”

According to the federal government, the primary terrorist threat now facing the United States is lone actors inspired by extremist ideology. These ideologies are very varied. The majority of attackers are on the far right, as in the Buffalo supermarket shooting in 2022. But sometimes, as in the New Orleans attack, the driving ideology is radical Islamism. Sometimes he is far-left or anti-Trump, such as the 2017 attack on Republican members and staff of Congress at baseball practice outside Washington and the apparent attempt to he assassination of Trump in Florida last year, or at other times, a mix of ideologies, what FBI Director Christopher Wray called “salad bar extremism.”

But the majority of people who become radicalized will never commit acts of terrorism.

“Radicalization is not the problem. …The problem is mobilization toward violence,” said John Horgan, a psychologist and director of the Violent Extremism Research Group at Georgia State University. “There are some common denominators, but we haven’t made much progress in trying to predict who will be involved in terrorism. »

For those who move from radicalization to violence, the ideals they hold are often secondary, experts in the psychology of terrorism say.

“We’re seeing more and more people choosing their own ideology based on their own grievances,” Horgan said. “They are looking for a reason to make sense of what they have already decided to do.”

The image that has emerged so far of New Orleans forward Shamsud-Din Jabbar seems to fit that profile. Jabbar appears to have long been a practicing, but not radical, Muslim. And according to authorities, he posted videos online before the attack in which he professed support for the Islamic State terrorist group and said he had initially planned to harm his family and friends but was worried due to the fact that subsequent news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the unbelievers”, and therefore decided to kill foreigners instead.

Although authorities have yet to confirm the motives behind the car bomb that detonated a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas that same day, experts have noted its political symbolism and parallels with the New Orleans attack – perpetrated by an industry veteran. alone, using a rental vehicle as a weapon.

“Both attacks have symbolism,” noted Christopher O’Leary, a former executive in the FBI’s counterterrorism division, now with the Soufan Group, an international intelligence consultancy. “One with an ISIS flag, but the other is probably intentional, because it was the Tesla truck parked in front of the Trump hotel, and like most terrorist incidents, it was limited violence and damage.”

The real motivation for almost all attacks like these is “the desire for significance and importance,” said Arie Kruglanski, a psychologist and co-director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. “This desire seems to be satisfied by an act of violence in the name of a cause. … The content of the ideology, the content of the story does not matter.”

Why people become radicalized

Experts agree that there is no single profile for perpetrators of extremist attacks and that terrorism today is more diverse than ever. But the process and risk factors for radicalization are well understood.

“Radicalization is a process of adopting an increasingly negative view of the enemy group and endorsing increasingly harmful actions against them. People are more likely to radicalize when they face uncertainty or disruption in their lives, such as the loss of a job or the death of a loved one, but this is not always the case. case,” JM Berger, an extremism researcher at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said in an email.

Societal trends in recent decades, from the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic, have exacerbated these feelings of disruption and destabilization for many people, Kruglanski said. “When people feel helpless because of immigration, economic inequality, losing their jobs to the pandemic or whatever, they are motivated. » This is when a person can be forced to act violently in the name of a radical ideology.

Recent research has begun to focus on how veterans in particular – like the perpetrators of the two New Year’s incidents – may be susceptible to moving from radicalization to violent extremist action, finding that military experience is a potential risk factor for attempted or actual terrorism.

“It’s because veterans are competent. It’s because they are competent. It’s because they care about people other than themselves,” said Horgan, who testified before Congress about the risks for veterans in 2022. These qualities make them not only responsive, but recruitable. “It is these qualities that make them attractive to terrorist groups. We warned Congress about this two years ago, and it fell on deaf ears. »

The details that have been revealed so far about Jabbar follow the known pattern that a veteran can be radicalized to the point of violence, experts said.

In the years before the New Orleans attack, he went through his third divorce, fell into heavy debt and lost his corporate job. Divorce court records from January 2022 show him detailing business losses and credit card debts running into the tens of thousands of dollars and more than $27,000 in delinquent mortgage payments. By August of that year, he had only $2,012 in his bank accounts, according to documents filed in the divorce case.

Although it remains unclear exactly how and when Jabbar became radicalized toward the ISIS ideology he espoused in videos en route to the attack, his methods follow a pattern for ISIS attacks. ‘EI, the experts said. The New Orleans attack is the second deadliest on American soil linked in one way or another to a foreign terrorist organization since September 11, behind the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, in Florida, during which the attacker pledged allegiance to ISIS.

“We cannot prevent all attacks at all times”

After several years of reduced activity in the United States, 2024 saw an increase in Islamist terrorist attacks and foiled plots, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which tracks extremist attacks and confirms plots in the whole country.

The change worried the center’s vice president, Oren Segal, even before the New Orleans attack, he said. “It was alarming to us that after so many years of decline, there were indications that more and more people adhering to this ideology were willing to try to engage in this activity. »

“This could be partly a response to the consolidation of groups abroad, and partly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said. “There are many signs that this type of activity is increasing. »

The Segal Center publishes data on terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, including associated ideologies. Its tally currently shows that Islamist extremist incidents represent a much smaller proportion of incidents than those associated with far-right ideologies.

Federal law enforcement has been pointing out these same trends for years. Although the threat of Islamist terrorism has not disappeared in the United States, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of domestic terrorism and violent extremism, according to a Justice Department report of 2024.

Over the past five years, the FBI has increased its efforts to combat domestic terrorism based on these growing threats. For a decade, the agency has routinely conducted about 1,000 active investigations of Islamist extremists per year, but more than doubled its investigations into fringe political extremist threats, primarily from the far right, from 2020 to 2022, from 1,000 to 2,700 active investigations per year, according to data published in 2023.

Law enforcement has been successful in preventing Islamist extremist attacks in the United States in recent years, said Berger, an extremism researcher at Middlebury, attributing the fact that few attacks have been successful in part to the fact that the FBI has “completely compromised ISIS communications channels.” But this success makes New Orleans’ offense stand out even more.

“What we will see in the coming days and weeks is whether there were any significant missed opportunities to prevent this attack, or whether it is simply the law of averages,” Berger said. “The sad reality is that we cannot prevent all attacks at all times. »

The re-election of Donald Trump and the start of his new administration also raises the possibility of attacks linked to the left or anti-Trump ideology and sentiments. Ryan Routh, the man accused of the apparent assassination attempt on Trump in Florida this fall, was reportedly angry with Trump over his policies toward Iran and Ukraine.

“With President Trump returning to power, professionals and terrorism experts expect that we will see a slower burn, but the emergence of a more radical left,” said O’Leary of the Soufan group. lost, I think we would have had immediate political violence. Since he won, I think we’ll see a slower burn.