The Coming Wave Of Domestic Terrorism Will Be Memed

This cancer is not new and has been there for generations.

by Justin Rosario

As we march to the next election and hopefully the next blue wave that will continue the collapse of Trump’s Republican Party, we are witnessing the growth of a cancer within the right. If we continue to ignore it, the results will be incredibly damaging, if not outright lethal, to the American experiment.

In June 2015, Dylann Roof opened fire in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people, with the explicit intent of sparking a “race war” between America’s white and minority population. In February 2019, a group of online right-wingers is working to turn Roof’s dark vision into reality, building a cult of personality around the Charleston killer and encouraging others to carry out similar attacks.

And new research from the Anti-Defamation League has found evidence this campaign might be working.

This cancer is not new and has been there for generations. Some of its earliest manifestations lead to the formation of the KKK, the largest terrorist organization in American history. We don't really talk much about the Klu Klux Klan as terrorists because we as a society have the twisted notion in our minds that terrorism is only something minorities and people who speak Arabic do. So how can we apply that label to a group of idiot racists that wore stupid costumes and gave themselves ridiculous titles like Grand Dragon, Imperial Wizard, and, I kid you not, Exalted Cyclops?

But the KKK were indisputably terrorists. They burned crosses in the front yards of blacks, Jews, and Catholics (and others) in order to, well, terrorize them. They would burn houses and churches. They lynched thousands of people, mostly black. Some would be beaten to death. Others would be hung from a tree. Others would be burned alive. Remember a few years ago when ISIS burned a man alive in one of their videos and conservatives screeched about how they were animals? The KKK, the conservatives of just two and three generations ago, did exactly the same thing.

In fact, the KKK killed and maimed and attacked so many black people in the South that millions of African Americans fled for the North. The sanitized version of history is that they migrated looking for jobs. The reality is that they were running for their lives. That is literally the definition of terrorism.

The KKK was eventually crushed by the federal government and its own corruption. And even though the violence abated, the cancer remained, flaring up now and again before going back into a fitful never-quite-full remission.

The Trump Flare Up

Steve Bannon and Breitbart organized the white nationalist far right into a semi-cohesive group and that, in turn, gave rise to Donald Trump. Trump turned around and told "normal" white Republican voters that they were free to let loose all of their darkest impulses; all of their hate. They would no longer have to hide their white rage at brown skin. And it was awesome! For a while.

Then it all fell apart when America's immune system rejected the right's white nationalism. The right was sent reeling at the absolute wall of rage pushing back against their mindless racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Naturally, they saw themselves as victims of a grand conspiracy to destroy white people (despite the fact that roughly half of the people pushing back were just as white as them).

Sensing that their hold on power is slipping, the right has become increasingly bitter and detached from reality. Fed by Fox News, AM Hate Radio, and right wing extremist sites, they are escalating their violent rhetoric and the violence that goes along with it. And nowhere is is this more obvious than in the online communities where fact-free rage feeds on itself in an endless amplifying loop. When Trump is removed from office and Republicans are left in shambles, the right is going to be literally triggered. A wave of domestic terrorism will sweep this country like nothing we've seen since the peak of Klan activity almost a century ago.

This particular wave of terrorists is being radicalized by, of all things, memes:

The incel community is well known on the internet, and is much larger than the Bowl Gang (there are about 60,000 subscribers to the main incel subreddit). There is significant overlap between the alt-right and incel forum user bases, and it’s clear at the very least that the two groups have hit on the same tactic for radicalizing young men: turning a killer into a hero through memeing.

Incels (involuntarily celibate) worship Elliot Rodgers, who murdered women because he couldn't get laid, while the Bowl Gang (white nationalists) worships Dylann Roof, who went into a church to murder black people because he knew they wouldn't have guns to fire back. These are the "heroes" currently inspiring right wing terrorism and they will be far from the last.

The right is deeply invested in ending American democracy before they are voted out of power forever. They thought Trump was their chance. They controlled all three branches of government and most of the states. But Trump is, frankly, an imbecile and the Republican Party is incapable of governing on the federal level. At the same time, the courts still have too many honest judges to allow the states to openly rig elections so that dream has gone down in flames. That's why the cancer is growing again. However, the attempted coup is failing and there will be no victory for virulent white nationalism. Even the GOP's plan of stacking the courts with extremist judges is only a holding action now.

All that's left then, is terrorism. Just like after the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the right will turn to widespread attacks on minorities to vent their rage at losing yet again. The press will tell us that each attack is a "lone wolf" and that there's nothing we can do about all these unrelated tragedies. That will be a lie.

We know that the far right has been organizing into a violent movement for years and we've been ignoring it. We know they've been breeding terrorists like flies and looked the other way. We know that we can do something about it but we don't because we're afraid to make them angry. Sooner or later, we're going to have to acknowledge that we have a network of domestic terrorists in our midst and they have been recruiting killers and training them just like ISIS or al Qaeda. Sooner or later, we are going to have to start  calling them terrorists instead of "disturbed" or "loners." We know exactly what they are: white men that have been radicalized by other white men and sent out to murder in the name of a far right ideology that America rejected.

Republicans will howl in protest. Fox News will fall to its knees and weep tears of fury. White Republican voters all across the country will be deeply offended at the very suggestion.

That's too goddamn bad.

If white Republican voters hadn't stopped the government from dealing with this a decade ago, we might not having Y'all Qaeda in the South recruiting angry white kids online with promises of glory and revenge against whoever they hate. If white Republican voters hadn't demanded that they continue to be treated like unimpeachable snowflakes, white kids wouldn't be so angry. If white Republican voters hadn't been more interested in being racist assholes than in just getting along with over 80 million of their fellow non-white Americans, we wouldn't even have a white nationalist problem. But they did and they did and they did so here we are.

Everything has a price and we're all about to pay a hefty one for the selfishness of white Republican voters. You'll forgive me if I'm not interested in their outrage when they're forced to pay a little more than the rest of us.