The recent increase in terrorist threats in the United States prompted the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to issue an alert last Friday (12). The bulletin, distributed to security forces across the country and unveiled this week, says the searches carried out at Donald Trump’s Florida home marked the beginning of a wave of threats to federal agents and other public safety officials.
Judge Bruce Reinhart, who authorized the operation to retrieve documents taken from the White House by Trump, has faced a barrage of threats and anti-Semitic hatred online.
Ricky Shiffer, killed after trying to shoot into the FBI building in Ohio last week, used Donald Trump’s social network TruthSocial in the wake of the FBI searches, urging users to go to Florida and kill agents if they resisted. .
On Monday, a Pennsylvania man was arrested after posting on the Gab website that his goal was to kill as many FBI employees as possible before being shot down.
The US is already living a new era of political violence. But there is a difference that makes the moment more unpredictable. The new terrorism that stalks authorities and ordinary citizens is not based on an ideology. It does not need to be sheltered by armed white nationalist groups. Don’t hide on the fringes of society.
Any loner, lounging around on social media, can see how this terrorism disguised as revolt against elites or vote-stealing is fueled by the ex-president, by politicians on Capitol Hill and by local Republican officials. They are calling for the demise of the FBI, the dismantling of the Department of Justice and the cut of counter-terrorism funds. In other words, the opposite movement to the one seen 20 years ago, when the threat was Islamic terrorism.
While a small number of GOP politicians have called for restraint, the extremist rhetoric, amplified by Fox News, which likened the Mar-a-Lago searches to a Nazi Gestapo blitz, serves as validation for acts like the Ohio terror attack. .
The TruthSocial network has served as a threat platform, where users have identified and disclosed personal contacts of Judge Reinhart and FBI agents who participated in the Florida searches.
Those who are already motivated by racial resentment, feelings of inferiority, and who hide themselves in the rabbit hole of conspiracies cannot find satisfaction in rationality. Those exploited by Trump’s greed and businessmen like Fox’s Rupert Murdoch and lunatic media crooks like Steve Bannon feel rewarded with a social identity that has nothing to do with merit or civic engagement.
On Wednesday (17), former Trump deputy Mike Pence criticized the attacks on law enforcement agencies and repeated the cliché that can no longer be taken seriously: “The Republican Party remains the party of law and order.”
It is worth remembering that the FBI only had Republican directors, it is predominantly white, conservative and Christian. In 2021, only 4.7% of the 13,500 special agents who knock on the door of those under investigation identified as African-American.
Using the term civil war would be a comparison to the period in which the country split due to fundamental differences between the slave-owning South and the abolitionist North. In the present dystopia there is no political cohesion, but loyalty to the decrepit cult leader.
