HARD TO BELIEVE, but there are Americans who spend their days dreaming of the mass uprising known as the “boogaloo” when blacks, Jews, gays, liberals and so forth will be eradicated and at last the white race will be safe from vaccines, taxes and mongrelization, and everybody will get to have all the guns they want, if they didn’t already, etc. etc.
This is the mindset of far-right terrorism, a pathogen that breaks out at various levels of virulence—riots, bombings, assassinations, mass shootings, stand-offs…events that can be forgettable in their pointlessness or were until Jan.6, 2021, when President Donald Trump inspired a mob to storm the Capitol of the United States, bearing a gallows and set on overturning the election he lost. Lately he’s threatening “bedlam” if the courts keep him from being president again.
Serious stuff.
Here now is a reference book, an authoritative cataloging of events: God, Guns and Sedition, by scholars Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, the latest in a 29-title series on terrorism from Columbia University Press.
Far-right terrorism in particular frightens the educated classes, not with its ingenuity or discipline but with a mindlessness some may remember from getting beaten up in school for raising their hands too much. The uppers see these lowers as vulgar and dangerous, as vandals recruited out of mobile homes decorated with busts of Hitler, louts who hate them for being educated and powerful.