Summer is officially still just around the corner, but if just the current week is anything to judge by, it’s going to be a long, hot season for domestic terrorists.
On Monday morning, a 22-year-old man who promoted neo-Confederate and fascist ideologies on his Facebook page attacked the Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas with a semi-automatic rifle and multiple rounds of ammunition, spraying the building wildly with bullets before law enforcement officers shot and killed him.
According to The Daily Beast, Brian Clyde filled his Facebook page with posts touting a white revolution in which “Libertarians and NatSocs” (National Socialists, also known as neo-Nazis) joined forces “during the Boogaloo” (far-right lingo referring to a hoped-for civil war based on race). He also posted multiple memes referencing the Confederate flag, as well as photos of himself holding guns.
Clyde had uploaded a video to Facebook the week before threatening to commit an act with a gun, with a likely reference to QAnon conspiracy theorists’ belief that “the Storm” of civil unrest is at hand. “I don’t know how much longer I have, but a storm is coming. However, I’m not without defense,” he said in the short clip, brandishing a rifle. “I’m fuckin’ ready. Let’s do it.”
According to media reports, Clyde walked toward the federal building and courthouse wearing a black ski mask and body armor, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle from the parking lot on people gathered on its steps and walking their dogs nearby. None were hit, but he kept firing at the building. He was confronted and shot by police officers responding to the scene shortly afterward.
Clyde’s attack, however, was just one of three incidents in the past few days involving yet another young white man radicalized online and planning to embark on a terrorist rampage.
In Concord, California, a 23-year-old man named Ross Anthony Farca was arrested on June 10 and charged with plotting a Poway-style terrorist attack on a local synagogue. According to authorities, his plan was to wear a Nazi uniform while committing the murders. In his home, investigators found books about Adolf Hitler and Nazi life, along with a semi-automatic rifle, 13 magazines, multiple rounds of ammunition, and a three-foot sword.
Meanwhile, in Greene County, Virginia, a 56-year-old Fredericksville man named Philip Dabney was also arrested on Monday, June 17, charged with planning a terrorist act. The details of Dabney’s case remain vague, but early media reports indicate that his Twitter account featured posts attacking Israel’s prime minister.
Though Dabney’s case may eventually not fit it, the larger pattern here is one we have already seen building for some time: “red-pilled” white men, radicalized online, acting on their twisted belief system with extraordinary terroristic violence, each act inspiring the next. The FBI wasn’t kidding when it warned last month that it was seeing an unusual uptick in far-right domestic terrorism.
Law enforcement, the courts, and the Congress are all trying to get their bearings while this tide sweeps in over our heads, and the White House letting us drift farther from shore. This, once again, is why the rise of white nationalism and its attendant violence needs to be an issue being discussed by the 2020 presidential candidates—at least, the Democratic ones.