Conclusion
The candidacy of Donald Trump has risked the normalization of hate speech and brought it into mainstream electoral politics in the United States. Trump’s repeated touting of a Muslim immigration ban has vilified American Muslims in the public sphere and made them the target of harassment and bullying, both in the virtual sphere and in the physical world. This paper traces a path between hate speech against Muslims online during a vitriolic election season, and how these latent hatreds create particular repercussions for American Muslims, against which they have little recourse. The poor enforcement of the Federal Hate Crime Statute, even in cases where there is a record of online speech that substantiates connections to white supremacist or domestic extremist groups, means these crimes are invisible, effectively grouped with others that do not have hatred of a minority group as their motivation.
On the other end, crimes involving Muslim defendants suffer from a surfeit of surveillance and an eagerness to prosecute and condemn, assisted both by statutes that require a terrorist organization to be “foreign” for it to be under the purview of the Material Support for Terror Statute and courts that elide over First Amendment protections when they are considering cases involving online speech of Muslim defendants (while upholding them in others). The consequence is that American Muslims are under siege both from the onslaught of hatred, online and in real life, while being denied recourse against discrimination or the same level of protection for their speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as would be available to other litigants. Even more troublingly, it means that while American Muslims surfing ISIS websites can be arrested and indicted, mass murderers like Dylann Roof must commit an actual massacre before they can be arrested or surveilled.
As noted toward the end of the paper, Assistant Attorney General John Carlin of the US Department of Justice has acknowledged the problems associated with the fact that no US statute currently recognizes “domestic terrorism” as a crime, nor that there is any legislation criminalizing material support for domestic terrorism. Crimes that are not recognized as such under the law are rendered invisible, and the legislative and judicial blindness toward domestic terror as a brand of extremism punishable by law (similar to all other foreign terror groups) belies the precept that all hatred and extremism, regardless of who purports it, can and should be punishable.
It is not just American Muslims, a frequent target of domestic terror organizations and individuals that purport racial purity and white supremacy, who are endangered by the refusal to criminalize domestic terrorism. A 2015 report produced by the Triangle Center for Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University surveyed 384 law enforcement agencies 74 percent reported domestic anti-government violent extremism as one of the top three threats while only 39 percent listed Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups as a top threat.
If there was an equivalent of the Material Support for Terrorism Statute that criminalized actions such as tweets, reposts, and affiliation with or support of social media accounts that purport racist and white supremacist views and the elimination of minorities, then members of the Trump campaign, and arguably Trump himself, would be under surveillance and facing indictments. An investigation by Fortune magazine identified the top fifty #WhiteGenocide influencers and found that Trump has retweeted at least seventy-five users who follow the top three #WhiteGenocide accounts. The investigation also looked at the top fifty influencers of the Trump slogan #MakeAmericaGreatAgain and found that forty-three of them follow at least 100 members of the #WhiteGenocide network.
The point of recounting these social media statements and online connections is to underscore the double standard applied to different kinds of terror, based on the who purports it. Under this existing double standard, where domestic terror or material support for it is not a crime because its proponents are usually, if not always, white Americans. It does not matter that their views--white supremacy, racial superiority, and, in many cases, incitements to violence against minority groups--actually result in crimes, including murders and mass shootings. If the same kind of scrutiny that is applied to those suspected of sympathies with foreign terror groups were applied to statements made by Donald Trump or his campaign staffers, they would likely be held guilty of domestic terrorism.