How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb

Firstly, the movement has been empowered by social media, which has provided a revolutionary boon to all terrorist radicalizers and recruiters. In the far-right universe, this trend has been especially prominent among teenagers on the internet, especially in gaming and social media platforms. In these online milieus, young people — particularly those who lack a sense of belonging, community, or mentorship in their offline lives — are often groomed by older extremists with the ideological legitimacy to impart compelling tales of the adventure and excitement of life underground.

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Secondly, the entrenchment of leaderless resistance, first articulated by Louis Beam in 1983 and reiterated in 1992, as the chosen strategy of extremist coordination has led to less complex attacks requiring less planning and logistical preparation than ones using explosive devices. And contemporary social media has empowered extremists to circulate it to an array of lone actors seeking agency and influence by turning their lethal fantasies into real-life violence. Today, even the more organized far-right networks usually prefer the leaderless resistance strategy to the traditional top-down/command-and-control model of terrorism.

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Finally, the persistence of mass shooting as America’s preferred domestic terrorist tactic has produced significant changes in the targets — and victims — of this violence. In previous terrorism waves, government facilities were often targeted as symbolic representations of the alleged repression that was at the heart of extremist grievances… In recent years, however, American far-right terrorists have continued to focus almost exclusively on the same type of publicly accessible soft targets: places of worship. In a recurring trend spanning the religious spectrum, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Islamic mosques, and Sikh gurdwaras, as well as community centers linked with these faiths, have been repeatedly targeted. Those who forgo places of worship might look for other locations where their target community typically gathers.

Hoggman and Ware conclude that

perhaps the most important reason to better mitigate the threat of mass shooting terrorist attacks is because of the range of other equally serious threats confronting U.S. law enforcement. While firearms attacks, as this essay argues, may have become the favored tactic of domestic far-right terrorists nowadays, they are by no means the only tactic or terrorist category threatening the country. If left unchecked, they risk diverting attention from other, potentially even more serious terrorist threats. Attacks on infrastructure, such as the thwarted plot by a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division in February 2023 that would have plunged Baltimore into darkness, underscore the diversity of threats and complex detection and defensive measures required. Similarly, the potential repercussions of the conflict in Gaza on terrorism in the United States was recently underscored by the arrest of a New Jersey man who was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist in hopes of implementing his plans to bring “jihad … to a US location near you.” And, of course, there is still the omnipresent danger of another Oklahoma City-like mass-casualty bombing, such as the 1995 incident that claimed 168 lives. 

Accordingly, if mass shooting terrorism has become the easiest attack to stage, it should receive the requisite attention to diminish its frequency, so that resources can be focused on perhaps less frequent but even more consequential other threats.