White Supremacist Violence: Groups, Attacks, and Prosecutions

White supremacist violence is the deadliest category of domestic extremism in the United States, carried out by a mix of lone attackers and organized groups and prosecuted through a patchwork of federal hate crime, firearms, conspiracy, and material support laws because no standalone federal domestic terrorism statute exists. Federal agencies have identified it as responsible for more fatalities than any other ideological motivation since at least 2000, and the networks behind it now operate across borders.

How Deadly the Threat Is

Between 2012 and 2021, the Anti-Defamation League documented 443 deaths linked to domestic extremism in the United States, and white supremacists were responsible for more than half of them. Department of Homeland Security data covering 2010 through 2021 found that white supremacists carried out 51 of 169 domestic terrorist attacks and plots, the highest count of any single ideological category.¹ A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis found that far-right extremists accounted for 67 percent of all terrorist plots and attacks in the United States during the first eight months of 2020.²

Overall domestic terrorism also surged. CSIS recorded 110 domestic terrorist plots and attacks in 2020, a 244 percent increase from 2019 and a 275 percent increase from 2017.¹ The DHS Homeland Threat Assessment for 2025 warned the terrorism threat environment would “remain high,” driven primarily by lone offenders or small cells motivated by racial, religious, gender, or anti-government grievances. Between September 2023 and July 2024, domestic violent extremists conducted at least four attacks in the homeland while law enforcement disrupted at least seven additional plots.³

Those numbers are almost certainly undercounts. A Senate investigation found that DHS and the FBI have failed to systematically track and report comprehensive domestic terrorism data, often submitting required intelligence reports late. The FBI’s 2019 decision to consolidate tracking categories into the broader label “Racially Motivated Violent Extremists” has been criticized for obscuring the specific scope of white supremacist violence within the data.¹ The Brennan Center has similarly noted that the FBI does not consistently investigate white supremacist crimes as domestic terrorism, with cases funneled through different program categories or deferred to state and local authorities.⁴

The Attacks That Define the Modern Era

The history runs deep. The 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four young girls, and James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The modern era of large-scale attacks arguably began in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in the second-deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.⁵

The pace of mass-casualty attacks accelerated sharply in the mid-2010s.

In June 2015, Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine Black worshippers.⁵

In August 2017, during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one person and injuring 28.⁵

In October 2018, Robert Bowers killed eleven Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. A federal jury sentenced him to death in August 2023.⁶

In August 2019, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in what he described in a manifesto as an attack targeting Hispanic immigrants. He pleaded guilty in February 2023 to 90 federal hate crime and firearms charges and was sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms, with a separate state case still pending.⁷⁸

In May 2022, Payton Gendron killed ten people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. He pleaded guilty to state charges of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism and received a mandatory life sentence; he also faces 27 federal hate crime counts, with jury selection in the federal case scheduled for August 2026.⁹¹⁰

In August 2023, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old white man, shot and killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, before killing himself. His writings, released by police in January 2024, confirmed white supremacist beliefs and cited the Christchurch mosque attacker as his primary inspiration.¹¹

The Organized Groups and the Cases Against Them

Alongside lone attackers, organized groups continue to operate, recruit, and in several cases plan coordinated violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,263 active hate and anti-government groups in the United States in 2025.¹² Federal prosecutors have brought major cases against several of the most prominent.

Atomwaffen Division and the National Socialist Order

The Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2015, was linked to multiple murders and plots before arrests in 2019 and 2020 decimated its active membership. In July 2020, it formally disbanded and reconstituted itself as the National Socialist Order, now proscribed as a terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.¹³¹⁴ Founder Brandon Russell served five years for explosives possession, was released in 2021, and was indicted again in 2023 for conspiring to attack electric substations in Baltimore. He was sentenced in August 2025 to 20 years in federal prison. Cell leader Kaleb Cole was sentenced to seven years in January 2022 for conspiracy to threaten and intimidate journalists and Jewish community members, and former member Samuel Woodward was sentenced to life in November 2024 for the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein.¹⁵

The Base

The Base has recruited members in the United States and abroad since 2018 and promotes terrorism and a white ethno-state. In January 2020, federal authorities arrested members in Maryland and Georgia who were stockpiling weapons and planning violence around a pro-firearms rally in Richmond, Virginia. Brian Mark Lemley Jr. and Canadian national Patrik Jordan Mathews were each sentenced to nine years in federal prison in October 2021; William Garfield Bilbrough IV received five years.¹⁶

The Terrorgram Collective

One of the most significant recent prosecutions targeted the Terrorgram Collective, a white supremacist network that operated through the Telegram messaging platform. In December 2025, Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Court documents showed that between 2022 and 2024, Humber provided operational guidance to followers who carried out attacks in Slovakia, Brazil, and Turkey.¹⁷ Co-defendant Matthew Allison of Boise, Idaho, faces 15 felony counts, has pleaded not guilty, and is awaiting trial. Prosecutors have connected 35 criminal cases to the broader Terrorgram network.¹⁸

Patriot Front

In June 2022, 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for attempting to disrupt a local Pride event. Five members were convicted of conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to five days in jail, one year of unsupervised probation, and $1,000 fines.¹⁹

How These Cases Get Charged

The United States has no standalone federal domestic terrorism statute. Federal prosecutors instead rely on a patchwork of existing laws. An entire chapter of the U.S. criminal code (18 U.S.C. Chapter 113B) is dedicated to terrorism, containing 57 federal crimes of terrorism, 51 of which can apply to domestic acts.⁴⁷²⁰ Violent conduct ends up prosecuted under whatever provision fits best: hate crime, firearms violation, conspiracy, or material support for terrorism.

Whether to create a dedicated statute remains contested. The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act has been introduced in multiple sessions of Congress. A version that passed the House was filibustered by Senate Republicans in May 2022. Senator Dick Durbin reintroduced the legislation in July 2025 as S.2457 in the 119th Congress. The bill would authorize dedicated offices within DOJ, DHS, and the FBI for monitoring and prosecuting domestic terrorism; mandate biannual threat reports specifically on white supremacists; and establish a task force to combat white supremacist infiltration of the military and law enforcement. It has not been enacted.²¹

Online Radicalization

The internet has been central to white supremacist recruitment since before modern social media. White supremacist bulletin boards existed by the mid-1990s, and strategists like Louis Beam used early digital networks to promote “leaderless resistance,” a decentralized model intended to insulate the movement from law enforcement.²² A study from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that in 2016, social media played a role in the radicalization process for over 90 percent of extremist plots or activities in the United States.¹

Major platforms have moved. Meta banned over 250 white supremacist groups and 890 militarized social movements through October 2021. Twitter (now X) removed over 1.8 million accounts for promoting terrorism between 2015 and 2021. YouTube removed 431,000 videos promoting violent extremism in a single quarter of 2021.¹ As enforcement tightened on mainstream sites, extremists migrated to less-moderated spaces like Telegram, Gab, and anonymous image boards, and into online gaming. ADL research found that 15 percent of adults and 9 percent of young people have been exposed to white supremacist ideology while playing online games. Activision Blizzard updated the Call of Duty code of conduct in early 2024 to explicitly prohibit the amplification of movements that promote discrimination or violence.²³

A Transnational Movement

White supremacist attackers now routinely cite each other across national borders. Anders Breivik’s 2011 massacre in Norway, which killed 77 people, influenced Dylann Roof in South Carolina. The 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, attack, in which an Australian gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers, was carried out by someone who cited both Breivik and Roof. The Christchurch attacker then inspired John Earnest’s synagogue shooting in Poway, California, Patrick Crusius’s attack in El Paso, and Ryan Palmeter’s shooting in Jacksonville.²⁴¹¹

Groups maintain active transnational connections. The Rise Above Movement and Patriot Front have sent members to meet with European counterparts. The Atomwaffen Division spawned the British offshoot Sonnenkrieg Division. The Terrorgram prosecution laid bare a network that directed violence in Slovakia, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States from a shared online infrastructure.²⁴ In January 2026, the Justice Department designated three additional Terrorgram leaders, located in Brazil, Croatia, and South Africa, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.²⁵ Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have proscribed groups like the National Socialist Order as terrorist organizations, a designation the United States has not applied domestically.¹⁴

Where Federal Policy Stands Now

In June 2021, the Biden administration released the first federal “whole-of-government” strategy focused specifically on domestic terrorism, built on four pillars: enhanced intelligence sharing, prevention of recruitment, disruption and deterrence of attacks, and confronting long-term contributors like racism. The Department of Justice reported a record number of domestic terrorism charges filed in 2020 using existing authorities.²⁶

The picture has changed markedly under the Trump administration. As of May 2025, the State Department issued a style guide banning the term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” except where legally required. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to eliminate over 100 offices and approximately 700 jobs, including portfolios focused on racially motivated extremism, and the Office for Countering Violent Extremism is slated for elimination. The FBI scaled back an office focused on tracking domestic terrorism in March 2025, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces have been redirected to assist with immigration enforcement. DHS has cut threat prevention offices and terminated related grant funding. Senior counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka described the policy as “refocusing on the real cause of jihadism, which is the ideology of jihad,” and former and current officials told The Guardian that white supremacist domestic terrorism has been recast by the administration as a “politicized smokescreen.”²⁷

These shifts have occurred while federal threat assessments continue to identify domestic violent extremists motivated by racial grievances as among the most significant threats to the homeland. State-level responses remain uneven, and the NAACP passed a 2025 resolution urging both federal and state governments to standardize hate crime definitions, increase penalties, and fully fund reporting programs.²⁸

1
U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Domestic Terrorism and Social Media — Executive Summary
2
Center for Strategic and International Studies. The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States
3
Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Threat Assessment 2025
4
Brennan Center for Justice. How to Combat White Supremacist Violence and Avoid the Flawed Post-9/11 Approach
5
Council on Foreign Relations. Far-Right Terrorism in the United States
6
Death Penalty Information Center. Jurors Sentence Robert Bowers to Death for 2018 Synagogue Shooting
7
U.S. Department of Justice. Texas Man Pleads Guilty to 90 Federal Hate Crimes and Firearms Violations for August 2019 Mass Shooting
8
Houston Public Media. Accused El Paso Walmart Shooter Pleads Guilty to 90 Federal Charges Including Hate Crimes
9
PBS NewsHour. Buffalo Supermarket Gunman Sentenced to Life for Racist Attack
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Victim Notification — United States v. Payton Gendron
11
Anti-Defamation League. Jacksonville Shooter’s Newly Public Writings Reveal White Supremacist Beliefs
12
Axios. SPLC Hate Groups Report
13
Anti-Defamation League. Atomwaffen Division (AWD) / National Socialist Order (NSO)
14
Australian Government — National Security. National Socialist Order
15
George Washington University Program on Extremism. Atomwaffen Division (AWD)
16
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Two Members of Violent Extremist Group “The Base” Each Sentenced to Nine Years in Federal Prison
17
U.S. Department of Justice. Leader of Transnational Terrorist Group Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Soliciting Hate Crimes
18
ProPublica. Matthew Allison and the Terrorgram Collective
19
The New York Times. Patriot Front Members Convicted in Idaho Pride Conspiracy
20
Matthew Shepard Foundation. Hate Crimes Report
21
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Durbin Reintroduces Bill to Combat Alarming Rise in Domestic Terrorism Threats
22
Brookings Institution. Dual-Use Regulation: Managing Hate and Terrorism Online Before and After Section 230 Reform
23
Anti-Defamation League. Addressing Extremism in Online Games Through Platform Policies
24
Anti-Defamation League. Hate Beyond Borders: The Internationalization of White Supremacy
25
Courthouse News Service. Terrorgram Leader Sentenced to 30 Years for Soliciting Hate Crimes, Murder
26
U.S. Congress. Congressional Hearing on Domestic Terrorism Strategy
27
The Guardian. Trump and the Far-Right White Supremacist Threat
28
NAACP. Strengthening Federal and State Responses to Rising Hate Crimes and White Supremacist Violence