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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/26/alt-america-terrorism-rightwing-hate-crimesAs Alt-America has grown, especially online, so has the violence that inevitably accompanies it: acts of domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and threats of civil war backed by a wave of citizen militias
by David Neiwert
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Sunday 26 November 2017 06.00 EST
Last modified on Sunday 26 November 2017 09.32 EST
In the days before he walked into Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church with a gun and murdered nine people, Dylann Roof put together a manifesto. It was a bizarre, rambling tract loaded with racial and political animus, much of it cribbed from white-supremacist groups with ties to South Carolina’s Republican establishment. In the final section, Roof wrote:
I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.
Roof ’s manifesto was reminiscent of a similar document penned in 2008 by a conservative Tennessee man named Jim David Adkisson. Adkisson was enraged by the looming nomination of a black man as the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
“I’m protesting the DNC running such a radical leftist candidate,†Adkisson wrote. “Osama Hussein Obama, yo mama. No experience, no brains, a joke. Dangerous to America, he looks like Curious George!†He was appalled by the race-mixing mores of modern times as exemplified by Obama’s mother: “How is a white woman having a niger [sic] baby progress?†he asked.
In July 2008, Adkisson walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Knoxville during a performance of a children’s musical, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun. He opened fire, killing two people and wounding seven more.
The image most Americans have when they think of terrorism is an act committed by someone wearing a turban. That is mostly a result of the al-Qaida attacks of September 11, 2001, and their lingering aftermath, especially a declared ‘war on terror’ that focused on battling radical Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
In much of the public imagination, Adkisson’s and Roof’s rampages were isolated incidents. In reality, however, they were key manifestations of a larger, more disturbing phenomenon, one which has been ignored or even actively discounted by elected officials and the mainstream media – rightwing domestic terrorism.
In the seven and a half years between those two attacks, domestic terrorism in America – acts that are plotted and executed on American soil, directed at US citizens, by actors based here – spiked dramatically. But hardly anyone noticed.
