Adam L Silverman

I’ve been waiting to see what, if any, new information was going to be reported on the RV bombing in Nashville yesterday morning before doing a post. Very little factually useful information has been reported so far. Earlier today I put together a preliminary assessment for a close friend who is a supervisory patrol officer in the police department he works for. This is the same guy I’ve mentioned in comments before who I teach martial arts with and who used to be that department’s SWAT team leader and sniper. I’m going to copy and paste a slightly modified version of that assessment below for you. It had three parts and I’m going to actually start with what was part two of the assessment, follow it with part three, and then finish with part one.

The second thing that stands out to me is that I’ve so far not seen anyone report that someone has taken responsibility. There is no reporting that a manifesto was posted on one of the chan boards or somewhere else. If this was someone like the New Zealand shooter – an extreme rightist who is heavily involved in the online extreme right shitposting and trolling communities – I’d have expected a manifesto to have been posted, highlighted, and reported on by now. If this was an extremist politicized Islamic based attack, I’d have expected one of the obvious groups to have taken credit by now. As of 1:15 PM EST on 26 DEC, neither of those have taken place. This leads me to worry that we’ve got one of two potential types of perpetrators. Either someone more similar to Eric Robert Rudolph – long radicalized and indoctrinated, with a very detailed set of grievances, good impulse control, and the ability to operate in ways that do not require a lot of attention to himself – or someone with a very specific grievance against one of the businesses or companies in the building adjacent to where the RV was parked or the building’s owner. AT&T does have a major data processing center there, but they’re not the only company in that building.

The third thing has less to do with the bombing and more to do with how the news media covers this stuff. By mid afternoon CBS’s Homeland Security correspondent wasn’t just tweeting that the Nashville Police and the FBI had a “person of interest”*, but was also tweeting the guy’s name and a description of him. This was followed shortly by a bunch of other people tweeting pictures of the guy’s house. In over 20 years – since that idiot profiler Clint Van Zandt*** misidentified Richard Jewel as the Centennial Park bomber, which allowed the news media to focus on the wrong person letting Rudolph get away and continue his terrorism campaign for seven more years – the news media hasn’t been able to learn not to run with initial details that may have no actual significance to the events they’re covering. In this case the immediate connection is that the person that law enforcement wanted to talk to had a RV similar to the one used in the bombing parked at his house for a couple of weeks. So did one of my neighbors. The fact that the RV my neighbors rented or borrowed for a camping trip is no longer in their driveway DOES NOT MEAN THEY BLEW UP A STREET IN NASHVILLE ON CHRISTMAS MORNING!!!!!! 

While the BBC is carefully reporting that the FBI thinks, at this time, that it may have been a suicide bombing because of the human remains found at the bomb site, and that the FBI is not looking for anyone else at this time, it still does not mean that is a final assessment. And the fact that Catherine Herridge of CBS is tweeting that this is the leading theory is meaningless. Herridge couldn’t accurately report on what she had for breakfast or which shoes she is currently wearing. Why CBS decided it was a good idea to hire a hard right reporter with a sweet tooth for every silly conspiracy theory that emerges from the conservative digital and social media ecosystem away from Fox News is beyond me. Regardless, once they get the DNA back from the remains found at the bomb site they’ll know if their current working theory is accurate or if they are back to square one. Of course this assumes that someone didn’t kill the person whose home they searched earlier today in order to steal the guy’s RV and left the body in the RV so that it would appear to be a suicide bombing, which would allow the actual perpetrator or perpetrators to get away. I think that’s less likely, but it is still a possibility.

And now we get to the first part of the assessment. Before I went to work for the Army, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on domestic terrorism in the US. While there was a complete empirical theory I built out of existing criminological, political science, and sociological theories and then tested it statistically, there were also three case studies to qualify what had been quantified. The primary of those three case studies was Eric Robert Rudolph. In the findings, I then contrasted what we were seeing domestically with examples of terrorism in other nation-states by what we would call foreign non-state actors. This comparison of domestic and foreign extremists and the terrorism they were undertaking was the focus of my work until I went to work for the Army five years later.

Right now we’ve got two things that stand out, given that there’s been very little new news since late yesterday afternoon/early evening. The first is the use of the warning, as well as what appear to be strings of gunfire broadcast before the warning and count down. Rudolph was one of the first domestic terrorists in the US to use warnings before his bombings. By one of the first, I specifically mean the first on the extreme right. Rudolph’s behavioral drivers were rooted in the fact that he was a religiously motivated racist, anti-Semite, homophobe, anti-feminist, anti-government xenophobe. Rudolph had been raised in – indoctrinated and radicalized from the time he was child – the Christian Identity movement and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. The Church of Jesus Christ Christian is the religious arm/component of the Aryan Nations. It provides the theology and dogma in teaching and preaching not just for the Aryan Nations, but several other extreme right movements in the US. Its core theology and doctrine** is an extreme, violent, racist, and rigid version of charismatic Pentecostalism that was fused with the British Israelitism/Anglo Isrealitism theology that had bounced around England and the US since the Victorian period. Woodrow Wilson was an Anglo Israelite, so this wasn’t something that was just on the extreme fringes of American Christianity. Decades after Wilson’s presidency and death, in the early post WW II period, Anglo Israelitism was fused with a white, segregationist charismatic Pentacostalism and that gave us the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. And while the Aryan Nations is now little more than the name and several different men fighting over who has the right to it in an attempt to grift off of it these days, the Church of Jesus Christ Christian is still active. Small compared to other evangelical and charismatic sects of American Christianity, but active.

Rudolph’s terrorism was rooted in a solid blend of extreme right and extreme religious, in this case charismatic Protestant ideas, theologies, ideologies, and dogmas. Just like those of the directly tied to the Aryan Nations Order I and Order II. As we all as the anti-government behavior of the Weavers – specifically Vicki Weaver as she was the actual driver of her and her husband’s anti-government, racist, and anti-Semitic behavior as she was both the brains in the family and the one who had fervently adopted the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian and pulled Randi into it. Rudolph was also tied into the Army of God, which also existed then and what’s left of it exists now in this nexus of far right and religious Christian extremism in the US. But what makes Rudolph important here is his use of issuing warnings before his bombs would go off.

Prior to Rudolph this tactic had been used solely by extreme left terrorists. Specifically, because these groups were partially or totally Marxist in their ideologies. They wanted their violence to inspire a popular or proletarian revolution to sweep away what is and establish a new socialist state and society. Even the groups that were anti-colonialist and nationalists – like the IRA – were also partially or wholly Marxist in their ideology. And since they wanted to inspire a popular uprising, they couldn’t be indiscriminately killing the populace that they needed to motivate willy nilly. So they tried to carefully target – kidnap the right official or elite or notable, assassinate the right official or elite or notable, blow up a building or structure that is a symbol of the tyranny of the elites and notables – without causing mass casualties. If you just use Northern Ireland as the case study, if you look at violence coming from the Catholic independence groups like the IRA, the PIRA, INLA (what were originally called the Republicans because they wanted Northern Ireland to be rejoined to the Irish Republic) before a lot of them devolved into organized crime groups, they were very careful in who they killed and what they blew up. The casualty and death tallies for their groups is comparatively low. When you pull the numbers for the Protestant loyalist groups, both those that wanted to just remain in the UK and those that got fed up with Britain and believed it was betraying them to the Irish Catholics and also targeted British officials, the casualty and kill numbers for their attacks are through the roof. While the Catholic independence groups would call in a bomb threat so they could symbolically blow up a building once everyone had been evacuated, the Protestant loyalist groups would just blow it up. They’d kill a building full of Protestants if it allowed them to kill their lone Catholic target. And this pattern – that extreme left terrorists were much more discriminating in their targeting, while extreme right, extreme religious, and extreme right and religious terrorists were not discriminating at all – holds all over the world.

Since Rudolph, the tactic of calling in a warning or providing one has become commonplace on the extreme right in the US. Just working from memory, I’m almost 100% positive that it was actually included in a revision to the Army of God manual. What Rudolph did in adapting this tactic was to use it not to get people out of the way so few if any were hurt in his symbolic violence intended to motivate the masses to rise up, but rather to draw law enforcement and first responders, the news media, and others into the kill zone. This tactic has now been used dozens of times over the past 20 years or so as we’ve seen an increase in extreme right domestic terrorism in the US.

And now we continue to wait for more information to be released. Right now we have no idea if this is domestic terrorism or someone angry at one of the businesses in the building adjacent to where the RV was parked or the owner of the building or someone hoping to commit suicide by cop or someone hoping to draw in law enforcement and first responders and commit a mass casualty suicide attack. What we do know, unfortunately, is that these things have a tendency to spawn copycat attacks. And that is what law enforcement needs to keep an eye out for right now.

Open thread!

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The Nashville, Tennessee RV BombingPost + Comments (133)