J J Brookhouser

J. J. Brookhouser is a senior researcher at Parhelion Group, a defense contractor specializing in intelligence collection management, analytics and security consulting. Before Parhelion, he worked in the spheres of anthropological research and investigative journalism, conducting studies on culture, politics and extremism in myriad countries across five continents, frequently under hazardous conditions. He is conversant in five languages including Mandarin and Arabic and spent a year as an Army Special Forces candidate before earning his M.A. in Intelligence Studies from the American Military University’s School of Security and Global Studies.

The author can be reached at J.brookhouser@parheliongroup.com.

Uncovering the Correlation Between Domestic Right-Wing Extremist Ideology and Violence in the United States from 2000 to 2020

ABSTRACT

Domestic right-wing extremist violence has been increasing since 9/11/2001, outpacing federal recognition of the problem. Preoccupation with Islamic terrorism is only a partial explanation of this shortfall, institutional barriers and an increasingly mainstream political salience of domestic right-wing extremist ideology create serious obstacles to efforts at countering violent extremism. This study presents a clear relationship between domestic right-wing extremist ideology and violence in order to inform an effective counter violent extremism strategy. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze the expressed ideologies of domestic right-wing extremist attackers in the United States from 2000 to 2020 before comparing them to the number of deaths resulting from their attacks to reveal the correlation between ideology and the number of deaths. Qualitative data gathered from primary sources cited in news media archives vetted and referenced by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) were theoretically coded to develop a set of aspects of domestic right-wing extremist ideology which were compared to quantitative data on the number of deaths gathered from the GTD. Comparison of aspects of ideology to the number of deaths showed that the ‘attacker justified violence’ aspect of ideology correlates significantly at a .05 degree of significance. Significant correlation between other aspects of ideology and the number of deaths, though prevalent, remain uncertain due to the small size of associated samples.

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A World Powers’ Guide to Domestic Extremist Co-Optation

Abstract

  Over the last decade the United States, Russian and Chinese governments have each been implicated in internationally recognized plots to subvert domestic and international law to their own benefit in which the individual countries’ interactions with a domestic extremist element played a pivotal role. While each of these events has garnered widespread media and academic attention, little focus has been directed at the way in which each Great Power interacted with domestic extremism in order to advance its goals. This study uses a Webarian comparative analysis to describe the Chinese internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the radicalization of the Republican party in the United States, and how domestic extremism was in each case co-opted in order to achieve unpopular but critical goals. This study finds that domestic extremist co-optation is a proven strategy commonly employed by powerful authoritarian regimes around the world to achieve the most imperative and sensitive policy goals. Domestic extremist co-optation as a foreign policy strategy is characterized by the spread of disinformation, the promotion of violence and the concealment of the party responsible. This study identifies three archetypes of domestic extremist co-optation: the ‘scapegoat’, the ‘proxy’ and the ‘base,’ and empowers future research to increase that number.

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j.brookhouser@parheliongroup.com