It’s going to get worse.
That’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and in fact now attempts to get people out of them. White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, the past few months—aren’t just trying to outdo another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh, the anti-government terrorist who blew up an Oklahoma City federal building and killed greater than 100 people in 1995—the worst terrorist attack within the united states before September 11, 2001.

On Saturday morning in El Paso, a gunman shot and killed 22 people, including children, on a Walmart. The shop was crowded for back-to-school-shopping season. The victims included a high-school student, an elementary-school teacher, and a couple carrying their infant son, who survived. And the shooter, based on an online manifesto authorities attributed to the suspect, saw himself fighting a “Hispanic invasion” as he gunned them down.
That shooting, in addition to yet another one hours later, wherein an attack killed nine individuals over half a minute in Dayton, Ohio, renewed the clamor for gun-control laws that has become a grim ritual after such events. But Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Can we have white-nationalist airline pilots?” Picciolini said. “There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to believe that that most of us don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.”

Reference:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/conversation-christian-picciolini/595543/