Encouraging White Christian Nationalist Extremism in the United States and Europe by Ignoring Minority Protection.

Official failure to safeguard minorities endangers the stability of liberal democracies by legitimizing the far-right's message that it is white Christian nationhood that is under attack and in need of law enforcement protection, not minorities or immigrants. This paper analyzes the link between institutional avoidance of hate crime law enforcement and the rise of alt-right fight-clubs including the Proud Boys and Rise Above Movement in the United States, and the National Socialist Underground in Germany. Despite the virulence and frequency of their violence, far-right hate groups are not currently the targets of federal suppression efforts in the United States. Until 2016 both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) monitored domestic extremism. It is no longer a primary focus of DHS, and the FBI now takes a reactive stance (Guardian, 2017). In Germany the head of the domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was recently ousted in the face of his apparent unwillingness to investigate far-right extremists (NYT, October 1, 2018) and violent vigilante groups wearing a far-right mantle have radicalized anti-immigration mass movements toward violence (Koehler, 2016). This paper details the poor quality as well as haphazard recording and publication that characterize official data on hate crimes in both the United States and Europe. Some European states, such as France and Sweden, have since 2014 curtailed reporting protocols that led to publication of the count of incidents of far-right violence. Lack of attention to bias offenses desensitizes both perpetrators and the public to their exclusionary effect, creating a permissive environment in which white Christian nationalist extremists practice for mass casualty attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]