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COVID19 raises risk of far-right terror
Neo-Nazi accelerationists see the pandemic as a means to speed up society’s collapse and achieve a white homeland
A neo-Nazi was arrested in Massachusetts this week after a failed attempt to bomb a Jewish nursing home with an improvised incendiary device. This is the second attempted act of domestic terror by the far-right since President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency in mid-March. At the end of last month, the FBI thwarted a white nationalist plot to blow up a hospital in Missouri, and the suspect Timothy Wilson died in a shootout while they were apprehending him.
The COVID-19 outbreak raises the risk that more of these incidents could occur in the future, according to law enforcement officials and counter-terrorism experts. Two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo warning that far-right groups were capitalizing on the pandemic to incite violence and spread misinformation.
Since the outbreak began, far-right channels on Youtube and Telegram have been abuzz with chatter on ways to exploit the crisis to advance political goals, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The idea of using the pandemic for political gain has particular appeal within an extremist tendency that embraces accelerationism as a…
