Last August, a mosque in Minnesota was bombed. Yesterday, three men from a rural central Illinois town were charged with carrying out the attack, which, according to the FBI, was intended to frighten Muslims in to fleeing the United States.

This, my friends, is the very definition of terrorism:

[T]he threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.

The three men charged, Michael Hari, Joe Morris, and Michael McWhorter, all come from the same tiny town of Clarence, Ill., with a population of fewer than 100. They are also suspected of carrying out a failed bombing attack on an Illinois abortion clinic.

Hari, a former sheriff’s deputy who is the suspected “mastermind” of the bombings, was featured in the Chicago Tribune last spring after the global security firm he founded, Crisis Resolution Security Services, submitted a $10 billion bid to build President Donald Trump’s promised wall on the US-Mexico border. He described his proposed border wall this way:

We would look at the wall as not just a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the American determination to defend our culture, our language, our heritage, from any outsiders.

Less than six months later, according to the FBI, Hari and his companions decided to defend American culture, language, and heritage not with a wall, but with pipe bombs.

I have written it over, and over, and over again in this space: The typical face of terrorism in America belongs to an angry white man.