Alabama Man & 4-Channer W. Body Armor Shoots Three Police Officers
1While protesting Black Lives Matter activists and the FBI’s “black identity extremists” remain popular bogeymen in the eyes of law-and-order conservatives, a man in Alabama recently reminded us once again that, in fact, the most lethal threat to police lives from a radical terrorist element in the United States comes from the white far right.
Three police officers were shot, one of them fatally, when they responded to a domestic disturbance call in Auburn on Sunday night. The man arrested shortly afterward, it soon emerged—Grady Wayne Wilkes, 29, a veteran from Auburn—was fond of posting memes from the alt-right online gathering spot 4chan, most of them mock humor about guns, white nationalist trolling signals, and encouragement for Proud Boys-style violence against left-wing protesters, who he described as “leftist scum.”
J.J. MacNab, an extremism researcher at George Washington University, collected and posted samples of Wilkes’ social-media posts on Twitter.