WATCH: Senate Homeland Security committee holds hearing on white supremacist violence

The Senate Homeland Security committee held a hearing Thursday on white supremacist violence in the aftermath of the racially motivated massacre in Buffalo, New York.

Watch the full hearing in the player above.

Committee Chair Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, opened the hearing by citing data that a majority of extremism violence is committed by far-right and white supremacist extremists.
Between 2012 and 2021, white supremacists committed the majority of murders carried out by extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Peters said.

Peters also spoke on the Buffalo shooter’s connections to white supremacy, noting that in the days before the attack, the shooter posted a screed hundreds of pages long online in which he referred to the Great Replacement Theory – a racist idea that non-white people are working to replace white Americans.

“This disgusting belief is at the center of some of the most horrific terrorist attacks that we have seen in recent years,” Peters said, also citing the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 people were killed.

“Once relegated to the fringes of our society, these extreme and abhorrent beliefs are now a constant presence in our nation’s mainstream,” Peters said. “Cable TV hosts push them in primetime, nightly programs and public leaders amplify them to their followers for their own profit and political gain.”

Ranking member Republican Rob Portman of Ohio echoed some of Peters’ remarks, saying that the “hateful attacks” must be condemned.

“We have a role in simply speaking up more and more forcefully,” Portman said.

But he also pivoted to other ideologies. Extremism can come from more than one part of the political spectrum, Portman said, citing the armed man who was arrested on attempted murder charges Wednesday morning outside of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. He was allegedly angry about the recent high court leaked decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“This attempt is the latest example that threats to our country cannot be placed in a single ideological box,” Portman said. “Some threats have apparently have nothing to do with race or ideology.”

Testifying at the committee were Elizabeth Yates, Senior Researcher on Antisemitism at Human Rights First; Eric K. Ward, Executive Director at the Western States Center; Michael German, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice; and Nathan A. Sales, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-CA, asked Yates about combating violent white supremacy online, where extremists often tone down their views to appear more mainstream.

Yates agreed that white supremacy is prevalent on social media platforms, “so certainly we need to be very forthright in demanding that social media companies enforce their own terms of service in order to diminish the availability of this content.”

But she also called on politicians and others in the public sphere to more forcefully denounce extremist views, both the most “vile” views and ones that are more coded.

“This is language especially that’s dehumanizing, that portrays them as invaders or that, especially in this case, somehow claims that these individuals, rather than refugees coming to this country to exercise their legal right to seek asylum, are somehow pawns in some nefarious conspiracy theory,” Yates said.