... In 2017, Michael Hari drove from Champaign, Illinois, to Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside the Twin Cities. There, he and two friends broke a window in a mosque and threw a pipe bomb in through the window. Hari ran a YouTube channel where you could watch him and his friends putting on ski masks and making terroristic proclamations about driving Muslims out of the country. It's not clear why they drove to Minnesota and targeted this specific mosque. Hari is also accused of attempting to bomb a woman's health clinic in Champaign. Writing for HuffPost, Christopher Mathias links Hari's organization to other anti-Muslim militias that are proliferating around the country, including The Crusaders, a group in Kansas City, Missouri, that plotted to blow up a mosque and apartment complex that housed immigrants from Somalia.
Then there are the Nazis. Atomwaffen, an explicitly neo-Nazi group, has been murdering people. ProPublica recently broke the story of the murder of a gay Jewish man by an Atomwaffen member, one of five recent murders associated with the terrorist organization. James Field, who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, idolized Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He belonged to Vanguard USA, a neo-Nazi group that combines anti-black racism and anti-semitism. Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in Parkland, Florida, engaged in racist rants on Instagram and had swastikas on his ammo cases. Motherboard recently reported that, while YouTube removes ISIS-related material reasonably quickly, neo-Nazi material can linger on the site for months and years.
These terrorist strains overlap and entangle, as we see in the case of Jeremy Christian. Christian had no coherent simple ideology. He read credulously from alt-right websites, contemplated Nazism, and spent time connecting with "Odinist" groups that appropriate medieval Viking mythos to support a platform of toxic masculinity and racism. In May of 2017, Christian murdered two men and stabbed a third in Oregon after they tried to stop him from harassing two young women of color wearing head scarves.
These murders, mostly committed by white American men, reveal patterns, but they're not evidence of some kind of single, secret organization dedicated to committing white-supremacist violence. That tends to puzzle people, because our conception of terrorism is linked to Islam and people of color, but also to cell-based groups like al-Qaeda: When we think of terrorism, we look for secret leaders sending out commands and planning operations. That's just not the model in this case, so when these white men kill, the media, elected officials, and law enforcement respond by disavowing connections to terrorism. These disavowals reveal a basic racism surrounding the word "terrorism," although many officials and reporters just want to keep people from panicking.
But maybe it's time to panic a little, or at least understand that these incidents are connected and require an organized response from our politicians, law enforcement, and media. When hundreds of "lone wolves" are reading the same websites, talking to each other, consuming the same stories, picking up easily accessible weapons, and killing the same targets, they have become a pack.