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Before the devastating terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day shook the nation, President Biden and his administration he repeatedly emphasized that the greatest threat facing the country was white supremacy, even explicitly stating that terrorist organizations like ISIS were no match for the danger posed by white supremacists.
“According to the intelligence community, white supremacist terrorism is the deadliest threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not Al Qaeda, white supremacists,” Biden said in June 2021 at the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre.
The comment came just weeks after he declared during the State of the Union that year: “We will not ignore what our intelligence agencies have determined is the deadliest terrorist threat to the homeland today: the white supremacy is terrorism.”
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, New Orleans and the nation were rocked by a suspected terrorist attack when a man identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, allegedly rammed a truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating the festivities on the city’s famous Bourbon Street. The FBI confirmed on Wednesday that they were investigating the incident as an act of terror, noting that they had confirmed that the suspect had an ISIS flag in the vehicle at the time of the attack.
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s economic playbook and the future of the U.S. economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
ISIS is a jihadist group that has carried out terrorist attacks around the world but it has lost momentum in recent years, including in 2019 when US forces killed Iraqi militant and IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The FBI said Thursday that Jabbar had been “inspired” by IS, adding that they have found no evidence that he was directed by ISIS to carry out the attack.
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The shocking attack has resurrected Biden’s earlier rhetoric about white supremacy and the national security state, which was also promoted by administration leaders such as Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“In the FBI’s view, the main domestic violent extremist threat comes from ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated white supremacy,'” Garland told the May 2021 Committee on ‘Appropriation of the Senate of the upper part. threats to the US
Law enforcement officers from multiple agencies work at the scene on Bourbon Street after at least ten people were killed when a person allegedly drove into a crowd in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, January 1, 2025 , in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dozens more were injured after a suspect in a rented pickup truck drove through barricades and through a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street. The suspect then got out of the car, opened fire on police officers and was later killed by law enforcement. (Michael DeMocker/Getty Images)
Garland joined Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayarokas in sounding the alarm about the threat white supremacists posed to the US that year. Garland and Biden administration officials at the time argued that on Jan. 6, 2021, when President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol building, they opened the floodgates to worry about inherent threats to democracy.
“I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol,” Garland said at the time, calling it “an attempt to interfere with the fundamental element of our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power”.
Biden has also cited the threat of white supremacy in more recent public statements, including during his 2023 commencement address at Howard University.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, pictured in an undated photo released by the FBI after he drove a pickup truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans and died in a shootout with responding officers. (F.B.I.)
“White supremacy … is the most dangerous terrorist threat in our land,” Biden said. “And I don’t just say that because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say that everywhere I go.”
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The US Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration released a report in 2020, called the “Homeland Threat Assessment,” which found that white supremacists and other “domestic violent extremists” posed “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation. Following Biden’s inauguration, Mayorkas stated that DHS “is taking a new approach to addressing domestic violent extremism, both at home and abroad,” compared to the previous administration.
New Orleans police and federal agents investigate a suspected terrorist attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025. (Chris Granger/The New Orleans Advocate via AP)
After Wednesday morning’s attack, conservative social media users and critics of the Biden administration resurrected Biden’s earlier comments about white supremacy, joking that the comments “have not aged well.”
The suspected terrorist’s brother told the New York Times that Shamsud-Din Jabbar had been raised a Christian but converted to Islam. The brother, Abdur Jabbar, stressed that his brother does not represent the Islamic faith and instead called his actions an example of “radicalization.”
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“What he did does not represent Islam,” he added. “This is more a type of radicalization, not religion.”
