A House hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism on April 9 turned into a spectacle of Washington dysfunction, with partisan fighting and extreme views on display that seemed to undercut the purpose of the event.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. watched the hearing on television between committee meetings, alarmed that lawmakers again appeared to be minimizing an urgent problem.

“The rise of right-wing domestic extremism, so much of it driven by white supremacy, is one of the gravest threats facing America,” said Pascrell, D-Paterson. “As some of the reactions online to the hearing demonstrated, we have a lot of work left to do.”

If he feels a bit like a broken record, perhaps that’s because Pascrell has been talking about the rise of right-wing violent extremism for at least a decade. Over the years, he has urged colleagues to heed warnings from national security agencies about the growing threat. But the issue became politicized, warnings went ignored and security agencies were undercut when trying to perform their jobs.

Even a spate of domestic terror attacks — including the Sikh temple shooting in 2014, the ongoing burning of black churches in the South and the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last year — has failed to shift the conversation or inspire meaningful change.

After the New Zealand shooting at two mosques last month that killed 50 Muslims, President Donald Trump was asked whether he sees white nationalism as a rising threat around the world.

"I don't, really," he said. "I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."

But experts caution that the problem has grown in the United States and abroad, fueled by political rhetoric and online communities that inspire hate and radicalize followers. Last year, every extremist killing in the United States — at least 50 killings — was linked to right-wing ideologies, with most perpetrated by white supremacists, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.

The missed warnings and the growth of hate groups signal potential for continued violence. But Pascrell is an optimist. During an interview at his Paterson office, the congressman said he believes Americans will blunt the spread of white supremacy with the force of law.

But he concedes that it won't be easy in a politically charged environment where white nationalist ideas have crept into the mainstream and the internet remains a Wild West for hate speech.

Political backlash

Pascrell served on the House Homeland Security Committee after the 9/11 terror attacks, when the immediate threat was overseas terror groups like al-Qaida. Later, the threat evolved as foreign groups, notably Islamic State, recruited people on social media and inspired them to commit acts of violence.

Domestic extremist groups were overshadowed. But around 10 years ago, intelligence officers at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned in a report about a resurgence in right-wing extremism, driven by the economic downturn and election of the first African-American president.

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Some lawmakers viewed the report as a political attack and demanded that Janet Napolitano, then Homeland Security secretary, withdraw it. She did, and the unit that produced the report was disbanded under political pressure.

Pascrell got into what he described as a “heated exchange” with Napolitano.

“Napolitano gets pressured to deep-six the extreme-right report,” he said. “I was livid, and I started to go chapter and verse. This is when we had a chance to do something about it, and the rest is history.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing groups were behind most terror attacks in the U.S. But the report a decade ago identified a change that would become a trend in terrorism: right-wing groups becoming the threat.

Over the last decade, right-wing extremists have been to blame for nearly three-quarters of the 427 extremist-related killings in the U.S., according to the ADL.

“This is happening,” Pascrell said. “The proof is laid out. You see all these incidents happening in Europe and the United States. And people are dying.”

Pascrell interviewed Daryl Johnson, the analyst whose report on right-wing extremists was withdrawn, on his public access show "To the Point" in 2017. Johnson said research after 9/11 was narrowly focused on foreign terrorism, even as attacks by those motivated by far-right beliefs outnumbered other groups.

Johnson said people began to associate terrorism with mass-scale attacks by foreign groups, while small-scale attacks in the U.S. were labeled hate crimes instead of terrorism.

"You have a whole intelligence community, a whole Department of Defense, engaged in counterterrorism against ISIS and Al-Qaida, but when it comes to domestic terrorists, American citizens, you’re talking the FBI, and that’s one agency," Johnson said.

Even in the FBI, fewer than one in five cases target domestic extremists, or those who don't have links to a foreign extremist group, according to an analysis by the Daily Beast.

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In 2011, Pascrell participated in House Homeland Security Committee hearings on terrorism inspired by Islamic groups. He also told lawmakers he was concerned that other threats were ignored. He wrote op-eds and letters urging administration officials to treat the problem seriously.

“We need to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Pascrell said. “There are many characters in this.”

Last year, the Trump administration disbanded an intelligence unit in the Department of Homeland Security that had been working on domestic terrorism, according to news reports.

And if the recent hearing was any indicator, Congress isn't likely to make inroads soon. Nearly all Democrats blamed Trump for a rise in white nationalism, while Republicans maintained that conservative views were under attack.

GOP witness Candace Owens claimed the rise in hate crimes was faked, the result of Democrats “manipulating statistics” to stir up fears for political gain.

The GOP also called Morton Klein, a right-wing pro-Israel activist who used his perch to condemn Islam and call for investigations of students who advocate for Palestinian rights.

Executives from Google and Facebook also faced Congress to answer questions about their role in the spread of hate crimes. As the hearing unfolded, hateful slurs on YouTube livestreams of the hearing grew so vile and numerous that the tech giant had to disable comments.

Asked what could be done about the rise in violent right-wing extremism, Pascrell said U.S. officials should let security agencies do their job and not stand in their way. Naming Trump, he said elected leaders should be careful about political speech that could be interpreted as condoning white nationalism.

"We take an oath, I take an oath, to defend the U.S. from foreign intrusion as well as domestic, and right now I think we have more domestic threats," Pascrell said. "It’s not just what I think. It’s what the FBI thinks. Look at how many incidents have happened over the last four, five years."

"What protects us is the Constitution, and we have to make sure we protect the Constitution," he said.