DOD Office Holds Book Discussion on ‘Far-Right Terrorism’

A Pentagon office overseeing special operations and irregular warfare held a discussion for a book on so-called far-right terrorism, according to a report from The Daily Caller.

Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Jacob Ware, a CFR research fellow, were slated to discuss their book uncovering right-wing terrorism in the United States through the Ku Klux Klan and the January 6 Capitol event.

The outlet obtained screenshots of emails advertising the event.

“Reminder to please join us at 1200 tomorrow morning via Teams (link below) for this virtual brown bag book talk event — renowned terrorism scholars Dr. Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware. Their new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America was released earlier this month,” the email invitation reads.

“Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither novel nor unprecedented,” a book synopsis reads. “They are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy.”

American Faith reported that the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) conducted a study on the U.S. military, finding “no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole.”

“The objective of the IDA study was to gain greater fidelity on the scope and nature of extremist ideologies and behaviors in the military community … identify the sources of such ideologies and behaviors; assess their impact; and develop strategies for preventing, countering, and neutralizing that impact,” the report says.

While government agencies have pushed the narrative of “extremists” operating on January 6, 2021, the report found that fewer than 10 individuals were charged.

“Of the more than 700 federal cases in which charges were publicly available a year after these events, fewer than ten were for individuals who were serving in the military at the time,” the IDA said. “Based on the size of the military relative to the general population and considering the rate of charges for males and females, we find no evidence that service members were charged at a different rate than the members of the general population.”

Last year, the Biden administration was accused of allocating funds from an anti-terrorism initiative to a university program that critics say links Christian and conservative groups, including the Republican Party, with Nazi ideologies.

The funding in question comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP).