The smoke and tear gas had barely dissipated from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when it became painfully obvious to anyone watching that the United States was ill-prepared to deal with the threat of domestic terrorism. For the past two decades, the United States has been narrowly focused on the threat posed by a specific type of terrorism — namely, Salafi-jihadist-inspired terrorism perpetrated by transnational terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. But even as the steady drumbeat of domestic terrorist attacks cascaded, driven primarily by violence perpetrated by far-right extremists, the U.S. government was caught flat-footed, unsure of how to respond.
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