I remember hearing this story in 2001/2002. And I remember that in my mostly white Texas communities, almost nobody would take this kind of threat seriously, even as we could see people around us being radicalized by and for endless war. https://twitter.com/anandwrites/status/1285207685483433985

Events like this white-power terrorist attack would be brushed off as isolated incidents, even as nice ordinary people in everyday life used exactly the same genocidal rhetoric, completely out in the open but channeled into U.S. military power.

This usually happened under the threshold of national public political discourse. The official line was "we're liberating the Iraqi people"; what I heard at lunch in the college cafeteria was "they're all terrorists to me."

The official line was "we can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud"; what I heard in Sunday school was "maybe Israel should just nuke the Palestinians."

The official line was "we're bringing freedom to the Middle East"; what I heard from an older relative was "these people understand nothing but force."

And so when somebody came to church ca. 2009 in upstate NY wearing a T-shirt that said "If you don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them," with an image of a U.S. soldier firing a rifle, my northeastern Republican friends laughed it off—what hyperbole!

Those of us who had been living in red states since 2001 knew better than to laugh. https://twitter.com/thursdayschild/status/1285214651056259072?s=21 https://twitter.com/thursdayschild/status/1285214651056259072

For that matter, the official line was "the United States doesn't torture, ergo, waterboarding isn't torture," but what I heard at a church retreat was "I should certainly hope we're using torture! I kind of like national security."

So it goes. And so it was that some of the same people I was arguing with in 2009 looked around at their fellow conservatives in 2016 and wondered if they were living through the invasion of the body snatchers. Because they hadn't seen what was there the whole time.

By then, the genocidal ideation was fully out in the open at the national level. "I don't know if sand can glow in the dark," Ted Cruz said during his primary campaign in 2015, "but we're going to find out!"

I'd been hearing this, in orgiastic tones, since September 2001.

And, of course, when people pointed out what was happening, the official line was "the left is crying wolf about 'racism' while coddling radical Islamists"; but what I heard from a friend's uncle in 2008 was that "Obama's going to be the first Arab president."

It was all there, in the open, for anybody who was actually inclined to pay attention.

But the same people who were responsible for the official line, of course, informed me that *I'm* the one who was out of touch with the American heartland because I became an academic elitist.

It was all such a waste.