One more post about mentally ill terrorists

With the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white guy with a bowl haircut shot and killed several black parishioners, we again come to the big conversation: was he a terrorist, or was he mentally ill. The answer is clear—most likely both.

His attack was from what we know, explicitly political, given his alleged comment "you rape our women and you’re taking over our country". That makes him different from, say, the Aurora Colorado shooter, whose attack on a movie theater had no political content.

Our shooter also had an assortment of far-right views, including being in favor of segregation according to his roommate, wore fairly obscure racist symbols (a patch of the flag of Rhodesia? That's digging deep!), and a Confederate Flag license plate.

He is clearly a political actor, and that makes his actions terrorism. He hardly needs to be a member of a group, as the white supremacist movement has been well-acquainted with leaderless resistance for years.

However, this doesn't mean that the shooter isn't mentally ill or at least unbalanced. Terror groups seek out the unbalanced for several reasons:

1. it works—people who are isolated or under significant stress are more amenable to propaganda appeals. People with friends will be talked out of extreme behaviors by those friends. People not under more than ordinary stress have better things to do with their time, or aren't tempted by paltry monetary awards or promises of extravagant heavenly ones. (What are the chances this shooter had a girlfriend? I'm thinking zero. What are the chances he had some "nice guy" narrative, except instead of "asshole jocks" he had "black guys" as his imaginary rivals for women? Pretty fucking high.)

2. they're useful—in the ordinary run of politics, even fringe politics, the too unstable are not useful. You're not going to buy a copy of a socialist newspaper or take a Tea Party leaflet from some weirdo who glares from afar but who won't make eye contact close-up. Twitching ramblers don't make for good public speakers, nor do people with flat affect. Ordinary people have a sense for sociopaths and work to avoid them. But, if you're looking for casual violence, there are plenty of unstable people who'll get a gun or motor vehicle or some dynamite and will make it happen.

3. they're easy to disavow—it was drugs! He was crazy! He just found our material at random on the Internet! He came to a meeting and told him to go away! (Most often, people like this are told they're not serious and they need to prove themselves...)

If you live on the political fringes, you'll find a lot of weirdos. Yeah yeah, look in the mirror, I know. Anyway, it's true. Obsessives, lost souls, misfits. Not every marginal personality is mentally ill, of course, but enough are. And there are plenty of mentally ill people who are fine comrades, good political leaders, and almost entirely immune to the appeal of individual violence.

But there are enough truly unbalanced people out there who become actual political terrorists because actual political terror groups aim their propaganda at the marginal and the disposable.