According to a report in The Omaha World-Herald, the FBI is investigating a Missouri man for stopping an Amtrak train in Nebraska with the intent of harming passengers. The man, Taylor Wilson, carried a business card belonging to the National Socialist Movement in Detroit, in addition to a .38 caliber handgun, several speedloaders, ammunition, a hammer, and a knife. Investigators later discovered that Wilson had attended August’s white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia:
In the affidavit, Czaplewski recounted statements from an acquaintance of Wilson’s who said Wilson had traveled with neo-Nazis to protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, which authorities believe was the Unite the Right rally in which a woman was killed in August.
The acquaintance also said Wilson “has expressed an interest in ‘killing black people’ ... especially during the protests in St. Louis.” The affidavit notes that Wilson is the chief suspect in a road rage incident on Interstate 70 in which a white man pointed a gun at a black female in another vehicle. The license plate of the man’s car tracked back to Wilson.
News of the investigation breaks weeks after a neo-Nazi teenager in Virginia murdered his girlfriend’s parents for trying to break the couple up. Had Wilson succeeded in killing the Amtrak passengers, he’d have added to a rising number of politically-motivated murders and terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists in the United States—an urgent problem, even if it is not reflected in U.S. policy. On its website, the Southern Poverty Law Center says the results of an August report produced by the Congressional Research Service highlighted “several gaps in U.S. policy related to identifying, analyzing, and assessing domestic terrorist threats. It notes that domestic terrorists ‘have not received as much attention from federal law enforcement as their violent jihadist counterparts,’ which has not always been the case.”
Also in August, Katharine Gorka, wife of Seb Gorka, successfully urged the Department of Homeland Security to pull anti-terrorism funding from Life After Hate, a non-profit that deradicalizes white supremacists. With Donald Trump in office, stopping would-be terrorists like Taylor Wilson has increasingly become a matter of luck.