Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy-monger and MAGA propagandist, announced on his Election Day show that it was “doomsday for the globalists.” But he warned his listeners to be on the lookout for false flag attacks calculated to try to spoil candidate Donald Trump’s victory. “In 2019, we elevated racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism to be the one of our top threat priorities and it has remained at that level.” Alex Jones’ dismissal of the foiled Nashville substation attack as an FBI “false flag” represents a larger tendency within the MAGA movement to reflexively downplay domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy, just as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House and is reportedly preparing to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray. Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist Trump has announced as his pick for FBI director, previously served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense during the incoming president's first term and led a probe of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Trump and Patel have given little indication of whether he will support the FBI’s campaign to combat domestic terrorism, which has assessed violent extremism driven by a belief in white supremacy as being among the agency’s “highest priority threats.” The Trump transition team and Patel did not respond to emails for this story. Patel, who prosecuted members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism division from 2013 to 2017, writes in a chapter entitled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” that “to pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.” As a source for his claim, the footnote in Patel’s book cites a news article about a letter written by Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to Wray. White supremacist violence in first Trump administration The FBI told Raw Story that “between 2015 and 2019, the most lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremism in the United States was from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race.” Those years bookend the June 2015 massacre carried out by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. that resulted in the deaths of nine African-American parishioners and the August 2019 mass shooting that targeted Latinos at an El Paso, Texas Walmart, taking the lives of 23 people.