This is no defense of Tyler Robinson, who is alleged to have murdered Charlie Kirk and may have been romantically involved with a transitioning man, or condemnations of the conservative activist murdered in Utah who often employed provocative tropes to galvanize his base and successfully propel them toward supporting Donald Trump.
I think we can all agree that there can be no justification for such a murder and condemn it unconditionally.
This is an analysis of the violent extremism throttling America and the world from someone who has covered wars, genocide, and fascism for several decades as a journalist and written four novels focused in part on the creeping radicalization that has begun to throttle America since World War II.
Most of all, it’s a wakeup call before the unthinkable becomes a reality.
The hard-right and the hard-left are not to blame, nor is President Trump or Antifa. They are the symptoms of this sickness, a sickness I have witnessed firsthand in Iraq, Syria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Rwanda, Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere.
I served several years ago as a consultant to studies by agencies in the governments of the U.S., UK, France, Kosovo, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Somalia on non-kinetic ways to mitigate violent extremism. My work in this area came at the tail-end of the Obama administration and extended into the first term of President Trump. The best minds were involved in these projects: psychologists, sociologists, reformed extremists, scientists, attorneys, government officials, former military, religious leaders, intelligence analysts, and journalists.
The Obama administration and its allies leaned in the direction of alternative strategies, providing funding for programs to counter threats from homegrown extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, and from foreign groups such as ISIS and Al Qa’ida. But the first Trump administration gutted those programs, including a promising initiative at the Department of Homeland Security, in part, one might surmise, due to the views of the president and his apparent strategy of fomenting division for political purposes.
It is hard to imagine any similarities between ethnic-Albanian Muslim extremists filtering into Kosovo after stints with ISIS in Syria and Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who murdered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. I took a deep dive into the former during a research mission in Kosovo on behalf of the aforementioned project and spent two years studying Ramos and the Uvalde tragedy for my upcoming novel, The Mural.
Peel back the surface of these vastly differing narratives and one finds that they have much in common, both following twisted, well-worn emotional paths to classic radicalization. That data-driven realization in our project a few years ago led us to the conclusion that countering the phenomenon of violent extremism requires governments to build effective community-based prevention and rehabilitation programs. Granted, kinetic action has a role, but it almost never finds a lone wolf killer like Ramos or Robinson.
The maximum-security prison outside Pristina in the disputed Balkan nation of Kosovo might be considered ground zero for such an undertaking, and its warden, Rasim Selmani, was an articulate guide for this progressive version of rehabilitating violent extremists and grooming them to be voices of reason in their communities once they are released.
Selmani and many experts view radicalization as a public health problem, with primary, secondary and tertiary symptoms that should be treated with primary, secondary and tertiary measures. When I visited, he explained that it all starts with diagnosing community resiliency and identifying factors that might contribute to unrest among community members, which could eventually trigger certain types of individuals to act-out violently. For example, an economically strapped neighborhood might express frustration with the lack of funding for youth sports programs compared to more prosperous areas of a city. But if one digs below the surface — employing opinion research techniques, social media sentiment analysis, heat mapping and other tools — there may lurk the seeds of larger problems stemming from feelings of disenfranchisement, disrespect, injustice and discrimination. He said addressing the underlying problems with solutions that respond to these symptoms is the key to community health and mitigating violent extremism.
Selmani’s words came back to me over the past two years studying Ramos and the Uvalde massacre for The Mural.
The factors he cited are a toxic stimulant for individuals vulnerable to radicalization: loners who may have been bullied, sexually abused or suffer from some form of physical or emotional handicap and spend most of their free time on the Web playing violent shooter-survivor games, surfing porn sites and interacting with strangers in the dark corners of hidden chat rooms. Ramos checked all those boxes.
So much water, and blood, under the bridge since the proposals emanating from our study a decade ago. And some analysts are starting to warn of the unthinkable unless world leaders heed a wakeup call that unheeded could lead to civil wars or worse.
In the imprecise world of intelligence, analysts often assess likelihoods in terms of what is possible and what is probable. Possible means an event has a “non-zero” chance of occurring but doesn’t assess its likelihood. Probable means an event is likely to occur, often backed by evidence, which suggests a greater degree of confidence in an assessment. In other words, all probable events are possible, but not all possible events are not probable.
What may sound like gobbledygook batted around in the basements of the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and other foreign counterparts has taken on more urgency in the current environments of unrest and insurrection. Given the spread of radicalization and the availability of precursor materials, some analysts have begun to assess with a “low degree of confidence” that an attack involving weapons of mass destruction is possible.
This is a wakeup call, one that demands new thinking on how to deal with violent extremism.
Sid Balman Jr. is a Pulitzer-nominated war correspondent, writer in residence at Sul Ross State University, and author of the upcoming novel The Mural. Sidbalman.com
