A white man wearing a Stars and Stripes bandana threw a Molotov cocktail into the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters in Austin, TX on Wednesday, and then casually walked away. The bomb did not ignite, and damage was minor. You might not have heard about the incident, however; although it was reported in local Austin news, and picked up by the Associate Press, neither the New York Times, nor the Washington Post deemed the story worthy of reporting.
It was, after all, just another day in America. As they used to say in the news business, “’dog bites man’ is not news, ‘man bites dog’ is news,” and a white Texan with a patriotic headwrap committing an act of terrorism against Democratic Party “libtards” barely even rises to the level of “dog bites man” these days. In America in 2021, it’s just one of those things, you know?
“I think it was one of those things,” confirmed Austin arson investigator Jeffrey Deane as he briefed journalists after police arrested a suspect on Friday. “This person was not happy with the current political climate; he blamed this office and who they represent for a lot of the issues that he saw as problems with the country.”
Austin police arrested Ryan T. Faircloth, a 30-year-old San Antonio bartender and would-be minor league pro basketball player, with the public Facebook profile of a fairly run-of-the-mill, if slightly pathetic, Magaist. There is the typical mindless patriotic nonsense like “God Bless the absolute GREATEST COUNTRY in the world,” mixed in with posts about sports and booze, of course, and a whole lot of barely-coherent anti-vax and anti-mask rants.
A frequent social media poster, Faircloth’s public Facebook feed is eerily blank from 7 October 2020 until 25 March this year. He might have simply been posting privately to his 2,000 friends, or he might have set his posts to private after the fact, or deleted them altogether. I am inclined to believe the latter; given the nature of his political commentary before and after his public social media silence, I suspect that he made some intemperate statements that he later thought better of making public.
Faircloth at least has enough introspection to know that he is a hothead. “Lately I was kinda at a loss of words for where the world went to and I took that out with my comments towards other people.” He posted on his Facebook profile, to no one in particular. “It’s not cause I’m actually mad at you, I was just ‘swinging’ at the first person to talk out against…”
It is worth noting, however, that he posted this admission of his excitability on Thursday, the day after he attempted to torch the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters, and then went on: “Go get what’s yours and if everyone has this mentality, as much as I hate to say it, but no country, political power, no cult or any opposition will be able to stop us… I’m riding for The People now.”
There is so much narcissistic grandiosity in that; it is the cri-de-coeur of a pitiable man (who appears in his profile picture in the catering staff uniform of black shirt and black bowtie) who is self-aware enough to know that he is in a dead-end job but has found meaning and mission in an adolescent fantasy of heroic masculinity. Only minutes later, and obviously surging with excitement, he posted what one can only characterize as a call to arms.
It is laughable, of course. Faircloth was in custody the following day, charged with arson and possession of a prohibited weapon. There are few things that can bring the hero’s journey to a crashing end quite like handcuffs, $40,000 bail, and security video catching you in a criminal act. Yet, I am not laughing. Faircloth’s very ordinariness, indeed the fact that Captain Deane seemed to dismiss this act of terrorism as just “one of those things” as if he has seen it a thousand times before, chills me to the marrow. And I have seen it all before.
A quarter of a century ago, as I researched the burgeoning radical right in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured almost 700 more in 1995, I kept coming across angry, young white men like Faircloth who were motivated not so much by political conviction, or even deeply-held racism (though, there was plenty of that), but by “identification with a mythic Teutonic warrior ideal.” I observed that, rather “than remaining anonymous participants in a bourgeois economy divested of the last shreds of the American Dream, the ultra-right promises that they will be special… they will be heroes.”
At the time, they were skinhead louts like Jason Smith of the Northern Hammerskins, lost young men like Milton Kleim, or absurd caricatures like the “farm-belt Fuhrer” Gary Lauck. They were loud and conspicuous, and their hateful, grandiose fantasies consumed their entire lives. You could see Lauck coming from a hundred yards away, swaggering in his brown shirt and Sam Browne belt – these people were not normal.
The most frightening thing about Faircloth however is that, right up to the moment that he decided to become a domestic terrorist, he was about as normal as a white man can be. The face in his mugshot is that of just another grinning bro with a shit job… And there are a whole lot of white bros just like him. There are tens of millions of Ryan Faircloths in America who are “not happy with the current political climate.” This is only the beginning.
But, you know, it’s just “one of those things.”