Violence is a central component of the far right. It uses violence as an organizing tactic, it praises violence as a philosophical virtue, and its vision of society would require large-scale violence to usher in. There were 20 far right murders in 2017, in addition to numerous bombings and assaults. The three incidents last week — the murder of 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue; the mail-bombings of high-profile liberal figures; and an anti-Black double murder in Kentucky — constitute one of the largest bursts of far-right violence in the United States in recent years.
The three perpetrators each came from different parts of the far right and targeted different kinds of victims. Taken together, they illustrate how the far right's targets include a wide range of people, in terms of age, race, religion and gender. And they illustrate how violence is endemic to different factions of this movement, and not just limited to open white supremacists like neo-Nazis.
On Saturday, October 27, Robert Bowers allegedly entered a Pittsburgh synagogue and murdered 11 people aged 54 to 97, on their day of worship. He had an account on Gab, a Twitter-like social media network that's favored by the "alt-right." There he was a prolific anti-Semitic poster. His account's banner featured the numbers "1488," a neo-Nazi alpha-numeric code.
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