Saw an interview with this guy's lawyer and something he said struck me as symbolic of much of the 'alt right' movement. He said this guy, who has been described as a white supremacist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay, who claimed to be a Seminole among other things, was lacking an identity. His father was Filipino, but abandoned the family as a baby. He was, the lawyer thought looking for something to belong to, some kind of identity, and he latched onto Trump.
With religion largely gone, with idea of 'clans' and tribes gone, with smaller and smaller families, a lot of people seem to be lost and seeking something to be a part of.
I've written about this in the past too. I believe we're hardwired to seek community and belonging, to form tribes. Our survival as a species depended on it. Now our families are spread out across the country or across the world, we live shoulder to shoulder with people we have no connection to, and the community institutions of days gone by don't really exist in the way they used to. And people have latched on to all kinds of other things to fill that void. People make synthetic tribes around other things. Sports teams being a prime example. And apparently the cult of Trump is another synthetic tribe that people have joined.
True, but he had, according to the reports, a history of mental illness. This was not his first act of stupid violent dumbness.
We've seen cases where mentally ill people with no connection to Islam or the Middle East decide to convert to Islam and fight in a Holy War. Amanda Korody and John Nuttall for example. I think several of our home-grown Canadian Jihadis are just people who wanted something to fight for. I'm not discounting that that most Islamist terrorists are born and raised in the faith, I'm just pointing out that we've seen multiple instances of these people who had nothing to do with the faith, often people with drug problems, becoming radicalized and go to war within a short span of time.
I think this MAGAbomber is similar. He got radicalized and decided he wanted to fight a different kind of holy war-- the US culture wars.
I think the kind of life-or-death language that is used by Islamists or by culture-war fanatics appeals to certain kinds of people. There seem to be some people who are just ripe to be radicalized and just need to find a cause. And I think that the Internet's MAGAsphere-- places like Reddit's "the_Donald" message board, 4chan, and various Twitter and Facebook communities, are just as filled with radicalizing propaganda as anything the Islamists have ever come up with.
-k