This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.

The rise of the radical far right in Europe poses a threat not only to the continent but also to Americans at home and abroad.

But while the U.S. government tends to be quick to use sanctions against perceived bad actors across the globe, when it comes to the transnational threat that far-right violence poses, successive U.S. administrations have been more coy about using another critical and effective tool: terrorist designations.

It wasn’t until mid-June 2024 that the Biden administration’s State Department sanctioned its first violent far-right group, the Nordic Resistance Movement. A neo-Nazi group based in Sweden but with a footprint that extends throughout Scandinavia, the NRM has built a reputation for brutality and espousing a vision of totalitarian rule. As the State Department noted in its designation, the group is also stockpiling weapons and explosive materials.

Prior to the Nordic group’s listing as a terrorist entity, the Trump administration designated the far-right Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist group in 2020.

Both groups are now officially deemed “specially designated global terrorists” by the United States. As a result, the groups are subject to an asset freeze, and anyone trying to support them risks prosecution for financing terrorism.

As a former State Department counterterrorism official with more than a decade of experience sanctioning terrorists under U.S. law, I know that it’s no accident that the groups U.S. officials are targeting now are based in Europe rather than in America.

Targeting the far right overseas

The threat posed by violent far-right actors is certainly as serious in Europe as in the United States. But United States agencies do not have authority to legally sanction groups such as the U.S.-based Oath Keepers, Proud Boys or the Atomwaffen Division as terrorists.

Constitutional rights that protect freedom of speech, assembly and the right to bear arms make it exceedingly difficult to sanction domestic groups. Further, all of the relevant executive orders and statutory laws in the anti-terrorism space are explicit that the State Department must designate foreign-based groups.

With limited power to crack down on far-right groups in the U.S., agencies are instead looking to curtail the influence of violent far-right ideology from overseas.

Yet the designations of only two violent far-right groups as “specially designated global terrorists” – separated by four years – is disappointing to me, especially when considering the range of far-right threats that dot the European continent.

The EU’s crime-fighting agency, Europol, reported in its December 2023 report that there were 45 arrests of far-right extremists in 2022 and the “threat posed from right-wing terrorist lone actors, radicalized online, remained significant.”

The most significant attack was an October 2022 shooting carried out in Bratislava, Slovakia, in front of an LGBTQ+ bar that resulted in two deaths. Interestingly, the State Department’s designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement highlighted that the group’s violent actions include an anti-LGBTQ+ platform.

Anti-immigration attacks

The Biden administration designated the Nordic Resistance Movement as a terrorist group shortly after EU parliamentary elections, in which far-right political groups made significant gains.

Far-right groups, such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany, won seats – 15 of them – for the first time. The group encourages violence against immigrants – communities often singled out by violent radical-right extremists such as the Nordic Resistance Movement.

In fact, the Nordic group’s most notorious attack was carried out at a refugee center in Gothenburg, Sweden, in January 2017, during which an attempted bomb attack left one person seriously injured.

The perpetrators of the attack were trained at a camp in Russia by the Russian Imperial Movement – the group that the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist group in 2020.

More recently, on June 18, a former member of the Nordic group carried out a knife attack on a foreign-born 12-year-old child in Finland.

Migration policy has long been a focus for violent far-right extremists, and increasingly politicians have been the targets.

In May 2024, for instance, a center-left German politician was beaten up while hanging campaign posters in an ideologically motivated attack.

In another assault, a politician in Dresden, Germany, was assaulted by a group that allegedly called out, “Heil Hitler.”

In fact, according to the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, the Nordic group’s goal is to “overthrow democracy across the Nordic region and Scandinavia in favor of establishing a Third Reich-inspired Nazi dictatorship.”

Groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement are leveraging a fragile and polarized European society, playing on fears that migrants are a threat to the continent.

Protecting democracies

Against the backdrop of recent violent far-right attacks against politicians and immigrants, along with recent European election results, the timing of the Biden administration’s designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement reflects growing fear in Washington that the far-right’s political rise in Europe may inspire violent extremists to move beyond chants, slogans and swastikas to mass shootings.

Nonetheless, the United States has been less inclined to sanction far-right groups than many of its partners. For example, the United Kingdom has designated seven far-right organizations as terrorist organizations; for Canada, the count is nine.

Simply put, the United States, despite its penchant to sanction enemies – from hostile states such as Russia to terrorist groups such as ISIS – appears reluctant to fully take advantage of its terrorist designation tools against violent far-right actors.

And that, I believe, could be a concern. U.S.-based far-right extremists are known to be very connected to similarly minded groups and individuals in Europe. Organizers of the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, had alleged links to the proscribed Russian Imperial Movement.

By designating groups such as the Nordic Resistance Movement as terrorists, the Biden administration is hoping to dissuade Americans from supporting Europe’s far right. Under the terms of the State Department order, if any American did offer support, they could end up behind bars.

At the same time, it may be that the Biden administration’s listing of the Nordic group is a signal to Europe that there are more far-right-related terrorist designations to come.

After all, the administration made a point to explain that the Nordic group’s designation was taken “following consultations with our European partners.”

And with multiple important elections on the horizon in Europe, Biden’s decision also represents an effort to champion democracy and push back against groups that promote us-versus-them narratives that define enemies as others worthy of attack.

If listing the Nordic Resistance Movement as a terrorist organization is a sign of more designations to come, it could further two of the Biden administration’s stated goals: promoting and protecting democracy overseas and combating domestic terrorism.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In Oklahoma, the start of the school year is just six weeks away. But one closely watched school that had planned to open in 2024 is now in limbo: St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, a tuition-free, online, K-12 institution.

St. Isidore received a controversial go-ahead from a state school board in 2023. Like all charter schools, it would have been funded with public money, but with more independence than typical public schools. St. Isidore’s would have been the nation’s first religious charter school, raising immediate concerns about its constitutionality.

Oklahoma’s attorney general, Republican Gentner Drummond, soon filed suit against the charter school board, arguing that the school would have violated both the state and federal constitutions. The dispute reached Oklahoma’s Supreme Court in April 2024.

The court rendered its decision on June 25. In a 7-to-1 judgment, the court invalidated the attempt to open St. Isidore, directing the statewide virtual charter school board to rescind its contract. Yet in a vote four days later, the board declined to do so, indicating the school would not accept public funding until July 25, 2025, at the earliest – essentially delaying its opening.

Charter schools are at the heart of the parental choice movement, which pushes for parents to have greater control in selecting where their children attend school, without having to pay private school fees. The country’s almost 8,000 charter schools educate about 3,700,000 students, or 7.4% of U.S. children.

Parent choice advocates may have thought the timing was right to try to open a faith-based charter school. Three recent U.S. Supreme Court cases expanded the boundaries of state aid to faith-based schools and their students, ruling that they cannot be denied generally available aid solely due to their religious status.

As one who teaches and researches legal issues involving religion and education, I believe Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board has the potential to further expand the boundaries of aid to faith-based schools and their students – a dramatic change worth watching.

Recent trend

All three of the recent U.S. Supreme Court cases relied on a legal idea I have written about called the “child benefit test.” According to this construct, it is constitutional under some circumstances to provide public funds to students who attend faith-based schools, or to their parents – but not directly to the schools, as would have happened with St. Isidore.

The first of these cases, 2017’s Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, dealt with a Christian preschool that was denied public grants to improve safety in its playground, which was open to the public when classes were not in session. School administrators sued, arguing that this constituted religious discrimination in violation of the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of religion. The high court agreed, reasoning that denying generally available funding, for which Trinity Lutheran was “otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.”

Three years later, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue further opened up government aid to students attending faith-based schools. The court ruled that Montana’s tax credit program for parents sending their children to independent schools must apply even if those schools are faith-based.

In 2022, the court extended this perspective in Carson v. Makin. Maine, with its low population density, offers assistance to parents in areas lacking their own public schools to help pay tuition for other schools, as long as they are nonsectarian. The Supreme Court found that this program should also apply to parents without a local public school who wish to send their child to a religious school. The program was unconstitutional, the majority wrote, because it was not neutral toward religion, nor did it afford parents the opportunity to send their children to schools of their choice.

Rethinking church and state?

By expanding the boundaries of permissible aid, these three cases boosted proponents’ hopes for even greater public funding for faith-based schools and their students.

Yet, it is important to keep in mind what likely prompted these changes in the first place: new faces on the Supreme Court. A majority of today’s justices tend to favor the “accommodationist” interpretation of the First Amendment, meaning they largely reject the idea that it demands a “wall of separation” between church and state, so long as the government is not privileging one faith over another.

Nevertheless, the parameters of the “child benefit test” often used to justify greater public funding has been evolving for years. The concept – one that legal writers use to describe the Supreme Court’s arguments, not a term the justices use themselves – first emerged in a 1947 dispute from New Jersey, Everson v. Board of Education. In Everson, the court upheld a state statute that allowed local school boards to transport students to faith-based schools – mostly Roman Catholic ones – reasoning that the students, not the schools themselves, were the primary beneficiaries of state aid.

Back to Oklahoma

In St. Isidore’s case, Oklahoma’s high court primarily relied on the state’s prohibitions against aid to religious institutions. The court feared that enforcing the proposed school’s contract “would create a slippery slope and what the framers’ warned against – the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.”

However, by barely acknowledging the trilogy of key Supreme Court cases permitting greater government aid to faith-based schools and their students, I think the panel left itself open to second-guessing and a possible appeal.

Within hours of the court’s ruling, Catholic leaders from the dioceses that would have overseen the school issued a statement saying they would “consider all legal options.” Days later, officials of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City announced plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

During oral arguments at the Oklahoma Supreme Court, Justice Yvonne Kauger asked an attorney for the state charter board, “Are we being used as a test case?” – possibly anticipating an appeal. Although the attorney said no, Kauger aptly responded, “It sure looks like it.”

Given the accommodationist perspective of a majority of justices on today’s U.S. Supreme Court, St. Isidore’s likely appeal bears watching. In the words of the eminent philosopher-baseball player Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 7, 2023. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.