In January 2016, an armed right-wing militia, Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. During the siege, other militias set up a defensive parameter around the headquarters and the police allowed members to leave and enter the refuge at will. It was not until the fourth week of the siege that law enforcement attempted to intercept some of the leaders, resulting in a shooting, a car chase and arrests. Still the siege went on for another two weeks before the remaining members surrendered to the FBI. None of the men involved were charged with acts of terrorism – even though they tried to supplant the US government’s federal authority in this area; used the threat of force to achieve their goals; and shot at the police and resisted arrest.

The founder of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, Ammon Bundy, is a white, middle-class Mormon man who had managed a fleet of cars in Arizona but whose father is a rancher in Harney County. Bundy believed he was ordained by God to end the federal government’s ownership of the mostly rural land in Harney County. Imagine if Bundy was not white, not middle-class and not a Mormon. What if he was brown, an immigrant, and believed he was ordained by Allah, convinced that the US federal government had perpetrated harms in other parts of the world? Would law enforcement still have stayed away? Would the charges have included terrorism? The label of terrorism was largely avoided by the media and by the government response to the occupation – instead this was largely seen as a protest of (possibly) infringed upon white men. This is a rather telling and blunt example of how race (and gender) is implicated in the narration and labelling of political violence as terrorist.

Even though the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017 forced Americans and other Western countries to realise that terrorism and political violence linked to white supremacy and nationalism are indeed rising (this has been demonstrated by the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database [START 2017] and somewhat in Terrorism Studies [Rosenfeld 2017; White 2016]), the denial of it continues on some level.