Dear Editor:

In his shamelessly self-aggrandizing 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy report, Donald Trump equates “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” with transnational drug cartels and “legacy Islamist terrorists” as one of the three greatest domestic threats to national security. No mention of right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

MAGA memory is short, apparently, and selective, obviously. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 169 people, including 19 children, and injured another 684, was the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Planned and executed by Timothy McVeigh, a radicalized right-wing Army veteran, the attack targeted federal government employees as a protest against taxation and federal law enforcement.

A member of the KKK and promoter of White Power, McVeigh aligned with the Patriot Movement of right-wing militias. He defined his struggle as “Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves.”

Fast forward to January 6, 2021. Unleashed by President Trump, MAGAts and anti-government militias tried to capture and kill Vice President Pence and Congressional leaders while overturning Joe Biden’s election victory. Since the British burned the Capitol in 1814 and the slave states seceded from the Union in 1861, no one has come closer to destroying our democracy than Trump supporters on that infamous day. After three hours of mass violence, Trump reluctantly called off the insurrection, telling the rioters that he loved them and wanted them to go home in peace.

His first official act as 47th president was to pardon them. The message to America’s far-right extremists is clear: You are the true patriots; you have license to arm, train, and intimidate everyone who is not a straight, white, conservative Christian male.

According to research by the National Institutes of Health, “Just prior to the COVID pandemic, more than 80% of homicides related to extremist violence in the US were attributable to right-wing extremism. In a 2022 analysis of more than 1500 extremist events in the US, right-wing extremists were twice as likely as left-wing extremists to resort to violence.”

Targeting groups that oppose neo-Nazis and encouraging fascist militias is dangerously misguided. Ask the Germans how that worked out for them.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay