High walls and liberal gun laws won’t protect Americans from the great terror threat within

The cold-blooded murder of children by gunfire seldom elicits condemnation from the American president, Donald Trump. His unquestioning commitment to the country’s multibillion-dollar domestic arms industry, and in particular the National Rifle Association, limits his compassion, let alone his political will to ending such massacres. So it was that Trump this week merely offered polite commiserations after 19-year-old Santino William Legan cut short the lives of a boy, a girl and an adult, and wounded 12 others at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California. Trump praised law enforcement officers “who swiftly killed the shooter”, but beyond that said little about the perpetrator of the abominably evil acts.

Such an omission was as irresponsible as it was crass. It gave propagandists time to portray Legan as an outsider, focusing on his foreign-sounding first name. They hoped that he would prove to be from poor immigrant stock, ideally with links to Mexico or a troubled region of the world such as the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, Santino is Italian for “little saint” and an extremely popular name among the kind of white middle-class communities that Legan grew up in. He came from Gilroy, a quaint town surrounded by countryside and best known for its garlic and boutique wines. Nobody has ever considered deporting him or his family to their country of perceived ethnic origin. No one has attempted spreading collective guilt in Gilroy and beyond beceause of crimes committed by its young white men.

Nevertheless, Legan was representative of a burgeoning sub-class of far-right terrorists who are threatening national security in western nations. His online activity revealed him to be radicalised by anti-immigrant, white supremacist literature. Just before his death, he discussed a 19th century racist manifesto called “Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest”, revelling in its fixation on extreme aggression. Using neo-Nazi, fiercely misogynistic tropes, he sounded exactly like thousands of other keyboard warriors who rely on gun culture vocabulary and imagery to try and get their poisonous messages across.

Legan was by no means an isolated crank. Analyse all the terror-related incidents in Trump’s America over the past year, and indeed in other western countries, and numerous similar characters emerge. FBI director Christopher Wray told a Senate hearing this month: “A majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” His remarks followed the conclusion of a group academics at California State University that “white nationalism has reflected a coarsening of mainstream politics, where debates on national security and immigration have become rabbit holes for the exploitation of fear and bigotry.”

This undoubtedly refers to rows of Donald Trump supporters chanting “Send Her Back!” in reference to Somalia-born politician Ilhan Omar during a rally in North Carolina in July, but it also covers the online fanatics. Read any social media outlets or mainstream media comment threads today and you will find them infested with politically motivated, angry individuals who could become the next Legan. This certainly applies to some of the British Bulldog-type nationalists who extol their country’s traditional martial greatness here in the UK.

The danger they pose has now led to “extreme right-wing terrorism” being included in official UK warnings for the first time. Fundamentalist affiliates of demonic groups such as al-Qaeda and Isis were once the primary subject of these warnings – which rise from low to substantial to critical – but the murders of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March changed that. Since then, multiple plots involving UK right-wingers have been foiled.

As an example, this month Daniel Ward, a 28-year-old British fanatic “impatient for a war on Jews”, was jailed for three years at Birmingham Crown Court for his links to National Action, a banned group linked to the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016. Just like Cox’s killer, Jo Alexander Mair, Ward had obtained weapons and ammunition while poring over Nazi literature online.

Trump and his British admirers regularly invoke an existential threat from foreigners. At the very start of his candidacy for the US presidency, Trump claimed Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime – they’re rapists”. He called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, suggesting he believed 1.8 billion people should all be viewed as potential terrorists.

The president still considers more guns and high walls as the best means of achieving safe communities. It is a pitiful deceit – and one that completely ignores a growing menace that his type of politics has done so much to encourage.