BROOKE: Mark Potok, Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, does not share Shane’s view. He thinks religious qualifiers are both misleading and a distraction from the source of most domestic terrorism. For instance, this week a man was found by the FBI with stolen explosives that a witness said he planned to use to bomb a federal courthouse in Elkins, West Virginia. Last month an Ohio man was charged with attempting to kill federal officers in Washington, DC. The day after Thanksgiving, a man shot up downtown Austin, Texas. All of these alleged terrorists were American. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly journal, The Intelligence Report, has just released a study called “The Age of the Wolf”, about the rise in so-called "lone-wolf" domestic terrorism. Potok suggests that Americans would be safer if, in the public mind, the word "terrorism" were not reflexively joined to Muslim Extremist or Jihadist, because on our shores, that’s not where that danger lies. Mark, welcome back to the show.

MARK POTOK: A pleasure to be here, thanks for having me.

BROOKE: So your study covers the last 6 years of domestic terrorism in the US, during which you cite 63 acts of terrorism, but what did your study find?

POTOK: That these kinds of attacks are quite frequent, really just as frequent as they were in the 1990s. We found that there was a domestic terrorist attack once every 34 days if you averaged it out.

BROOKE: Wow. And what tends to motivate them? Are they Islamic extremists or are they white supremacists?

POTOK: 5 of the 63 incidents we looked at involved jihadists. But that needs some explaining. We were not looking at Americans, for instance, who go abroad, say to Syria, and we're also of course not looking at Islamic extremists coming from abroad, plotting against the United States.

BROOKE: Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center released this study last week in advance of this week's White House summit on Countering Violent Extremism, and I don't assume that the timing was coincidental.

POTOK: No. We decided to release it in advance because it seemed more and more apparent that the government has been paying very close attention to the so called Islamist threat and paying really far less attention to the other half of the terror spectrum, our own homegrown radical racists and so on. We think that the government really must remain aware and cautious about the threat of domestic terrorists.

BROOKE: Because you found that in the US since 9/11 we've seen much more criminal violence from the American radical right.

POTOK: That's right. There have been a number of studies in addition to our own that have shown plainly that more people have been killed by the American radical right than jihadists of any kind, either domestic or foreign, since 9/11. For instance, most people probably do not know that the day after Thanksgiving last year Larry McWilliams opened fire in Austin, Texas, he shot more than 100 rounds at the police headquarters, at the Mexican consulate, and at a federal building there, and intended to go on and kill as many people as possible. He was loaded up with propane tank bombs. A fairly miraculous shot by one police officer standing 320 feet away killed this man. It later turned out that he was a white supremacist who saw himself as carrying out an attack on the government on the orders of God.

BROOKE: What in your view is the difference between a hate crime and an act of terrorism?

POTOK: Well, a hate crime might be, simply, I don't like back people, Jewish people, Muslim people, gay people, whatever it may be. But the point is it's a kind of personal act. A terrorist act is a message crime, like lynching. If you burn a cross on the lawn of the interracial couple's house, every other interracial couple within shouting distance also is terrorized, and also is in a sense victimized.

BROOKE: Why don't we pay as much attention to the American terrorist, the homegrown white supremacist terrorist, as we do to the jihadist terrorist?

POTOK: Well, I think that for many, many many, years it was easy to think of terrorists as people who did not look like us or think like us or worship like us. Obviously, Oklahoma City in 1995 changed that in a dramatic way. But it's perhaps worth remembering about Oklahoma that in the 2 days before Timothy McVeigh was arrested, a whole string of so-called experts went on national television to say that this attack has all the hallmarks of radical Islamist terror. Which it did. Oklahoma definitely changed the perception of American law enforcement officials. Immediately after the bombing, President Clinton authorized the hiring of 500 more FBI agents tasked to domestic terrorism, and in fact law enforcement really cracked down in those years of the late 90s and helped to drive the movement more or less out of existence. But then of course came 9/11 and once again the attention of this country switched very hard to jihadists from abroad.

BROOKE: And what about the phrase "Islamic terrorism" - I mean, it's almost like "disgruntled employee", they're always joined together, it seems.

POTOK: Well, this attack from the right on President Obama for not using the phrase "Islamic terrorism" seems really quite ridiculous. We don't call Larry McWilliams, the man who described himself as a priest in the fight against the anti-god people, as he opened fire in Austin, a "Christian terrorist," and yet his actions were explicitly based on his bizarre reading of the Bible. And the list goes on and on. What Larry McWilliams or Tim McVeigh did had very very little to do with Christianity, and it seems to me that the same is true of the vast majority of what some people would like to call Islamic terrorists.

BROOKE: And I guess that's borne out in this recent poll by something called Christian Lifeway that found that 27% of Americans think ISIS represents the real Islam?

POTOK: Yeah, it's an incredible poll and another kind of shocking piece of that poll was the same research organization polled senior Protestant pastors around the country and found there that 45% of those people felt that the Islamic State was an accurate representation of what Islam really is.

BROOKE: So what do you want people to take away, fundamentally, from your study, Mark?

POTOK: Well, that while the jihadist threat is extremely real and extremely significant, we have an equally significant threat from our very own people. People born and raised in the United States of American --

BROOKE: Equally or greater?

POTOK: Well, I wouldn't say greater because there is no comparison out there that comes close to what happened on 9/11. On the other hand, we have seen very large numbers of American terrorists plotting to do things on that order. In the late 1990s there was a case out of Texas in which a group of five Klansmen intended to blow up a natural gas refinery. Their idea was that this would cause such chaos that all police and law enforcement officials would go to that explosion and they would meanwhile go to the other side of the county and rob banks and finance the white people's revolution, the Aryan revolution.

BROOKE: These guys watch a lot of movies.

POTOK: When that plot was prevented, federal officials said at a news conference that had these people succeeded they would likely have killed between 10 and 30 thousand people. 10 times the number of people who died on 9/11. So you know while it may be true that people linked to Al Qaeda are better at their work than some of our own domestic terrorists, it's not for want of trying.

BROOKE: Mark, thank you very much.

POTOK: A pleasure.

BROOKE: Mark Potok is a Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and editor of its quarterly journal, The Intelligence Report.