U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz this week accused Democrats of focusing excessively on white supremacist violence, while overlooking attacks on white people, police and Jewish and Asian Americans in an effort to inflict political damage on Republicans.
FILE - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a news conference on April 7, 2022, in Washington. Arizona Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego lashed out at Texas Republican Sen. Cruz in a series of profane tweets in response to the massacre at a Texas elementary school. Gallego responded Tuesday, May 24, 2022, to Cruz's comments predicting that Democrats and the media would try to politicize the shooting. U.S. Sen.
“Unfortunately, we see over and over again efforts to politicize acts of violence,” Cruz said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on domestic terrorism, where he alleged that Democrats in Congress “try to use the charge of ‘white supremacy,’ which is undoubtedly evil, bigoted and wrong, and weaponized by their own party, they try to use that as a proxy for attacking a political party they disagree with.”The Texas Republican’s remarks drew a swift rebuke from U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
Federal law enforcement data and expert studies have shown that terrorist attacks by violent extremists . The trend has been driven largely by white supremacists and the far-right, though left-wing extremists accounted for an increasing proportion of terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. last year., the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies found that violent far-right terrorist attacks and plots have outnumbered those of every other group, including left-wing extremists, in every year since at least 1994.