Lyndon McLeod, who killed five people in Denver on 27 December, subscribed to a variety of right-wing beliefs, but remarks in his social media posts, novels and interviews signal his place in the broader misogynistic ecosystem — the “manosphere.” McLeod adhered to a smaller subset of the manosphere that focuses on hyper-masculinity. Typically, advocates of hypermasculinity believe themselves to be “alpha males” and are frustrated they are not given the respect, deference or position in society they believe they are due. Adherents believe a degeneration of modern society has allowed weak “beta males” and women to usurp power from the “alphas.”

Financing terror, chemical weapons, forensics and digital archives: The ex-German prosecutor now heading the UN’s special team on crimes of the “Islamic State” explains where the search for justice will focus.

Students of extremism and domestic terrorism have noticed an intriguing phenomenon: the convergence of far right and far left extremists and the breakdown of old ideological walls. Far-right extremists have valorized the Unabomber and praised the Taliban; a re-launched white supremacist group announced a new “Bolshevik focus” calling for the liquidation of the capitalist class; a growing ecofascist youth subculture joins with extreme racists in a call for the creation of a white ethnostate. “These trends highlight the strange and unanticipated ways in which domestic violent extremism scenes in the United States are fragmenting and reassembling,” they write.

A train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles pleaded guilty last week to a federal terrorism charge for intentionally running a locomotive at full speed off the end of railroad to “wake people up” to a government plot to use Covid-19 as a pretext to “take over” the country.

Most of the homeland security architecture built in the past twenty years has been devoted to protecting Americans from an act of international terrorism. Carrie Cordero writes that as a result, Americans are safer than they were twenty years ago from a terrorist attack directed or inspired by foreign groups on U.S. soil. She says, though, that more significantly, the threats to American safety and security have compounded in the past two decades. “These disparate threats and circumstances have challenged the effectiveness of the homeland security enterprise.”

Following the territorial defeat of ISIS, an estimated 1,840 to 1,912 total female foreign terrorist fighters returned to Western Europe and another 59 returned to the United States. Criminal justice systems have steadily began to treat women as violent extremists, but they have been slower to provide adequate repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration support for women seeking to return to their home countries.

People whose moral beliefs and values align closely with other members of their online communities — including those on social networks Gab and Reddit — are more prone to radicalization, according to new research.

Ten universities formed a consortium to combat terrorist and criminal attacks on soft targets such as schools, hospitals, shopping malls and sports stadiums. “The challenges of keeping people safe in soft targets and crowded spaces gets more complicated every day,” said one expert.

Coronavirus has highlighted how anxiety, uncertainty, and the reordering of democratic state-citizen relations can breed susceptibility to violent extremist thinking and action.