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May 18, 2022 - 4:00pm
Among those who make it their business to study and to write about terrorism, there is a palpable sense of exhilaration when some group or individual carries out an act of terrorism. None of them, of course, would admit to harbouring any such emotion: it would look cruel and callous. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that, for many professional terrorism observers, terrorism, at some deep level, is what they really want to happen. Of course they do: if terrorism stopped, they’d be out of business.
Actually, for some, it isn’t all that deep. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, for example, wasted little time in seizing on Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo to showcase her professional acumen and expertise. Miller-Idriss is the director of the Polarisation and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington (D.C.). Since the attack, she has been tweeting incessantly about her work on far-Right extremism. In one tweet she bragged about how in demand she was: “Fielding so many requests to explain the ‘great replacement’,” she said. In another tweet, she tried experimenting with a tone of pained bashfulness: “Stay tuned for more from me, from @PERIL_AU, as long as we & this expertise remain relevant, which I hope against hope is not long.”
Another north American-based educator called Tedra Osell, who describes herself online as “Teacher, writer, cat lady”, sought to use the Buffalo shooting as a launch-pad to hawk around a theory about how the far-Right is radicalising white kids on gaming platforms:
Osell offered zero evidence for her many spectacular claims and hectoring commands (“You NEED to be countering the messages he is getting. He is hearing white nationalist and fascist shit daily.”), and the whole thread seemed to be a pastiche of another extensive Twitter-thread by another white mother in response to another far-Right terrorist attack. ‘Do you have white teenage sons?,’ Joanna Schroeder tweeted in August 2019 . ‘Listen up. I’ve been watching my boys’ online behavior & noticed that social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists.’ Miller-Idriss, who has written about echo-chambers, retweeted Osell’s tedious thread.
But the gold medal for the most coldly opportunistic response to the Buffalo massacre must surely go to Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of a data analytics company called Moonshot. On the day after the massacre, she tweeted: ‘If this administration truly wants to stop horrific attacks like this, it needs to truly invest in prevention. Not $20M, not $80M, but far more.’
Miller-Idriss, you will be astonished to learn, heartily agreed with Ramalingam, complaining that ‘US investment in prevention is literally a drop in the bucket…’ It’s almost as if Ramalingam and Miller-Idriss might actually stand to professionally benefit from more domestic terrorism in America.
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SubscribePolarisation and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL).
It’s always a source of amusement to me that someone comes up with such tortuous organisational names just to fit the acronym that they have already thought of.
I’m not for one moment saying that this person was anything put a violent racist, but why did he turn to real life violence instead of just words? Who knows – probably nothing to do with all the negative press aimed at white men. then??
Well said!
What about that recent Norwegian nutter?
That was quite a while back.
He quite literally wrote his reasons down
Yes, disturbingly enough, that’s absolutely what he did.
These groups and individuals are funded purely to make this sort of hay when ‘events’ happen. It’s like the ‘X not Hate’ groups – there are lots of them. But when an ‘event’ happens, where do the journalists turn for ‘expert’ opinion? Ta Da. Expert corner. They’re funded specifically to jump in as spokespeople on a particular narrative by certain interest groups – have a look at who finances them – to be the jack-in-the-box response when something happens, as it invariably will.
There’s enormous truth in the theory of elite overproduction, imo. So many otherwise unemployable graduates are entering the grievance industry and making a nice living from it. Ultimately, a society that does not generate meaningful jobs for its young must provide something else if societal collapse is to be avoided.
Whereupon said unemployable graduates get busy bringing about said societal collapse.
As an aside, the Guardian et al. are keen to try and persuade us that it’s all in our heads. Right wing scaremongering and nothing more. It would seem that, having carped about the supposed gaslighting behaviour of others for years, they have acquired both a facility and a taste for indulging in it themselves.
The so-called (official) ‘experts’ are problematic – certainly. But more worrying is the hidden myriad of nonentities in our workplaces, communities and education establishments who are purveyors of woke policies and practices, on whom the madness that infects 21st Century democracy depends. The ‘experts’ are visible and therefore challengeable; the street-level wokes amongst us are not!