For an eye-opening look at the sort of significant terrorism threat President Trump couldn’t be troubled to mention in his State of the Union speech last night, give a read to this profile of the neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division. It’s sobering reading:
An 18-year-old in Florida allegedly shoots and kills two of his roommates. A 21-year-old, also in Florida, plots to bomb synagogues and a nuclear power plant. A 17-year-old in Virginia allegedly shoots and kills his girlfriend’s parents. And a 20-year-old in California allegedly stabs a gay Jewish college student 20 times, burying him in a shallow grave.
All of these young white men had connections to the Atomwaffen Division, a well-armed neo-Nazi group enamored with Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler whose members harbor grand and demented delusions of fighting a “race war” and overthrowing the U.S. government.
Their alleged crimes all occurred in just the last eight months, most recently in January, adding to fears that an emboldened American white supremacist movement is growing more violent by the day. White supremacists, after all, murdered twice as many people in 2017 as they did the year before, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Here’s more on that chilling bomb plot:
During a search of the house after the murders, authorities discovered bomb-making equipment and radioactive material they determined belonged to Russell. In Russell’s bedroom, police found a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. In his car were rifles, ammunition, binoculars and a skull mask. Prosecutors later alleged that Russell had planned to bomb civilian targets, including synagogues and a nuclear power plant in Miami. He was recently sentenced to five years in prison.
As the profile of the group makes clear, Atomwaffen openly flaunts its Nazi affinities, from its use of swastikas and SS runes in its propaganda and recruiting materials to its German name, which translated means “Atomic Weapons Division.” They advocate both race war and national socialist revolution against the United States. As some of their propaganda material puts it:
The key to success in the struggle ahead is self-discipline. While it is the time to be “legal” we must stolidly endure whatever the State sees fit to inflict upon us. When it is time to revolt, we must be prepared to unleash the furies of hell on the state until it yields.
So while the president uses the State of the Union to once again conjure up the phantom threat of immigrant terrorists to justify wholesale changes in American immigration policy, this crew of true native sons is recruiting and organizing on college campuses and at rallies across the United States.
But that’s a terrorist threat the president seemingly has little concern for despite everything we know about how serious it really is.