A new report out Thursday finds that right-wing extremists on Twitter are “highly engaged” with the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party and highlights the role the GOP has to play in countering their more violent fans.

The report — titled “Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, Evaluating Content and Countering Violent Extremism in Online Social Networks” — originally sought to examine the way that extremists use social media to interact among themselves, in this instance focusing on white nationalists’ use of Twitter. But throughout their investigation, the study’s authors, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation associate fellow J.M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, inadvertently discovered something interesting.

They began with 12 “seed” Twitter accounts for their unambiguous status as white nationalists. The authors then created a dataset of 3,542 Twitter users who interacted with those 12 seed accounts, of which 44 percent self-identified as white nationalists. After analyzing the interactions between the 3,542 users and the 12 seed accounts, the authors identified the 200 top-scoring accounts, of which 83 percent self-identified as white nationalists (for the top 400, the self-ID rate was 74 percent).

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.

The authors of the study determined that the usage seemed to be “driven more by white nationalists feeling an affinity for conservatism than by conservatives feeling an affinity for white nationalism.” They were also quick to note that the data were pulled during a period of time surrounding the Republican National Convention, potentially providing a boost in references to the GOP. However, a comparison group — composed of left-wing anarchists — did not yield similar results linking them to progressive ideals or the Democratic Party.

This seemingly unidirectional engagement, however, has a potential upside. Due to their influence, the GOP could help reduce the affect that violent extremists have on the national stage, the report says:

Since the data suggests white nationalists are actively seeking dialogue with conservatives, CVE [countering violent extremism] activists should enlist the help of mainstream conservatives, who may be considerably more successful than NGOs at engaging extremists with positive messaging. Further research may also suggest avenues for engagement between other kinds of extremists and other mainstream political and religious movements.

The report comes out on the heels of a Southern Poverty Law Center report identifying a spike in far-right anti-government groups, with their number having reached an “all-time high” in 2012. As the Republican Party is desperately seeking to rebrand itself from being seen as a “scary” party of primarily white people, it would do well to listen to the ICSR’s recommendations and not those of people who would defend slavery.

The New Republic yesterday published a lengthy piece by Washington Times reporter Eli Lake highlighting how the “Republican foreign policy consensus has collapsed” and that the GOP contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination are, as the article’s title says, “all over the map.” Lake notes that there’s an internal strife within the GOP over whether Muslims pose a threat to America — with some neocons and conservatives like Grover Norquist embracing mainstream Islam and others, led by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney, believing that, as Gaffney often says, the nation is close to instituting Sharia law.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is running for president and she is currently surging in polls. However, Bachmann isn’t exactly a foreign policy aficionado and she doesn’t talk too much about her views on international relations. Lake writes that when he started asking around about where she stands, he repeatedly was told to “talk to Frank Gaffney“:

Gaffney himself stressed that he had no formal relationship with Bachmann as an adviser. But he did say that he had contact with several of the GOP candidates. And, of Bachmann, he said this: “She is a friend and a person I admire. I hope she is getting the best counsel she can.” He added, “We are a resource she has tapped, I’m assuming among many others.” When I asked him whether Bachmann had been briefed on the Team B II Report, he replied, “We’ve spent hours, over several days with her. I think she’s got the bulk of what we would tell her in one of the more formal presentations.”

So it’s safe to assume that Bachmann is getting a regular dose of Gaffney’s crazy anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Gaffney’s Islamophobia is well-documented. Last year he released a report purporting to document the threat posed by Islamic law in the U.S. (no Muslims actually contributed to the report). Among the report’s wild accusations, one was that members of the Obama administration are part of the “Iran lobby.” Gaffney thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate the American conservative movement. Before her confirmation to the Supreme Court, Gaffney claimed Elana Kagan would impose Sharia law on America. He even accused Gen. David Petraeus of “submission” to Sharia and thinks the president is secretly Muslim.

But Gaffney’s baseless far-right views aren’t limited to his Islamophobia. In addition to flirting with birtherism, as late as 2009, he claimed to have evidence of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “collaborating on all kinds of things.” He has even said Iraq was complicit in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Gaffney also once said that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would lead to reinstating the draft (hasn’t so far) and he claimed the DADT repeal would force some “radical” LGBT “agenda” on the U.S. military.

More recently, Gaffney said Obama’s policy on Israel (which is basically the same as all of his predecessors) will “catalyze the next Middle East war.” He even said Obama might order a military attack on Israel.

This is Frank Gaffney, currently Michele Bachmann’s primary foreign policy adviser.

Former DHS Domestic Terrorism Analyst Daryl Johnson

The greatest threat of large-scale attacks come from individuals and small groups of extremists who subscribe to radical Islamic or far right-wing ideologies, said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START. [...]

Ackerman said nationally, law enforcement has been focused since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 on the threat of Islamic terrorism, even as the threat from domestic anti-government groups has been growing.

“Some people believe we have taken our eye off the ball when it comes to domestic right-wing extremists,” he said.

Sadly, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly isn’t taking these threats too seriously. Daryl Johnson, a former senior Department of Homeland Security domestic terror analyst, told the Southern Poverty Law Center last month that “there is just one person” at DHS who is focused on these issues. Why? Shortly after President Obama took office, DHS produced a report warning of the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and that domestic extremists were looking to recruit Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

However, the report was leaked and right-wing media figures and Republicans in Congress were outraged. “The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired,” Newt Gingrich said at the time. Michelle Malkin called it a “DHS hit job on conservatives.” Bowing to the right-wing hysteria, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually ordered the report withdrawn.

Johnson, who describes himself a Republican, said that after the controversy, DHS gutted his unit:

When the right-wing report was leaked and people politicized it, my management got scared and thought DHS would be scaled back. It created an environment where my analysts and I couldn’t get our work done. DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies. Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. [...] Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” eco-terrorists, the whole gamut.

“Sad to say, we were right on this one. History has shown that,” Johnson said, referring to the murder of abortion provider George Tiller and neo-Nazi James von Brunn who killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

When news broke on Friday of what appeared to be a terror attack in Norway, right-wing pundits in the U.S. were quick to point the finger at Islamic extremism, with some even publicly doubting that the killings could be motivated by right-wing views. Then when we finally learned that the terrorist was Anders Breivik, a blue-eyed, blond Norwegian apparently motivated by anti-Muslim nationalist views, the Islamophobes and alarmists on the right began contorting themselves to express support for his cause while dismissing his tactics.

Many of these pundits, walking back their early accusations of Islamic terror, fell back on the notion that “jihadists” were still a threat no matter whether or not the Norwegian attacker was one.

“It’s one of the first instances since Oklahoma City when terrorism on this scale was not Islamic,” said a former Bush administration official on Fox News. (At the time, conservatives also tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Islamic terrorists.)

“There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West,” wrote Washington Post neoconservative blogger Jennifer Rubin from an American perspective.

But according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, the Europeans — part of Jennifer Rubin’s “West,” to be sure — actually faced a minimal threat from Muslim extremist terror. Here’s a chart highlighting Europol’s numbers from 2009 and 2010:

So out of 543 failed, foiled or successfully carried out terror plots in Europe in 2009 and 2010, only five — less than one percent — were related to Islamic extremism. (HT: Dan Gardner)

ThinkProgress intern Sarah Bufkin contributed to this post.