STARRING, DONALD AS STOKER ACE:

White nationalism is a thing in America, again. This is not new, exactly. We had the KKK and very real, very dangerous white nationalists in operation--with all of the attendant layers of support in the culture--60 or 70 years ago.

It has now re-emerged. And while this growth is still in its early stages, the reemergence is real. Anyone who will not concede that point is either foolish or operating in very bad faith.

You can see all of the analogs to the Islamic terror food chain, in miniature. White nationalists have their terrorist actors, such as Patrick Crusius. They have their ideological theorists, such as Richard Spencer, who provide the intellectual framework for terrorism without getting their hands dirty. Russia is not exactly a state sponsor, but more like a state-sympathizer.

If you look around what has become mainstream American conservatism over the last four years, you see some people who look like Anjem Choudary, insisting that there is no such thing as white nationalism. (See Dennis Prager twist himself into a logic pretzel here, for example.) And then a larger number of people who mouth de minimis condemnations of the actual terror acts and then turn around and continue to stoke the fires of racial grievance with abject nonsense. Like Amy Wax.

And while it should go without saying, it does not help to have, as the president of the United States, a man who claims that Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists.

The attack was actually a deep-state "false flag" operation, tweeted conspiracy theorist Mark Taylor, the self-described "firefighter prophet." Brendan Dilley, who hosts a MAGA-themed YouTube program, took to Twitter to ascribe the El Paso massacre to antifa, the often pugilistic anti-fascist movement. Two days later, the president of the United States, he of the alpha Twitter feed, blamed the media for both the attack in El Paso, Texas, and a subsequent massacre at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. For the small-time gaslighters like Dilley and Taylor, it was an epic assist from the Big Guy.

Taylor and Dilley are but two of the right-wing social media personalities who traffic in outlandish theories involving the so-called "deep state" or advancing the cryptic comments of an anonymous commenter who goes by the moniker "Q" in what has become known as the QAnon movement, which works on a premise that is an outgrowth of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. That phantasmagorical theory nearly got a family restaurant shot up in December 2016 when a man with a gun drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., with the aim of liberating children who were said to be held in the restaurant for the alleged pleasure of top figures in the Democratic Party. Thankfully, the round he shot lodged in the restaurant's door, and the gunman was apprehended by police.

Last week, Yahoo News reported that an internal document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation designated the spread of such conspiracy theories as a violent threat to the population at large. From the leaked document: "The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts."

As Juliet Kayyem, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security, notes in the Washington Post, acts of violence committed in the name of white nationalism or white supremacy are often cast as the work of a "lone wolf." But in reality, she says, "there are no lone wolves." While Kayyem primarily focuses her attention on message boards 4chan and 8chan (the latter has been disabled since it was used to disseminate the El Paso killer's racist screed), there's a whole cottage industry of right-wing talkers, preachers and pontificators whose utterances seem designed to prompt the unhinged to unleash mayhem upon unsuspecting people.

Wiktionary defines the term "stochastic terrorism" this way: "The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random."

Kayyem describes the 8chan and 4chan internet spaces, where anonymous commenters often post misogynistic, racist and other hateful messages, as places where stochastic terrorism is stoked. 

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