Man who claimed Trump will start ‘racial war and crusade’ is arrested in Seattle
A Nazi sympathizer who threatened to butcher a Hispanic woman and boasted that President Donald Trump would wipe out nonwhites in a “racial war and crusade” was arrested on charges of making threats, the FBI said on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said that the suspect, 35-year-old Eric Lin, sent a barrage of chilling and gruesome Facebook messages to the unidentified woman, who lives in Miami. Lin was arrested on Friday in Seattle, where he had recently moved from Clarksburg, Maryland, but was charged in Miami.
“This is a RACE WAR and ALL of you will DIE!” Lin wrote to the woman on Facebook in early June, according to a criminal complaint. The next day, he wrote, “You want to see what a real Nazi can do?” adding later that he was operating under the authority of Hitler. In July, he wrote that “I thank God everyday President Donald John Trump is President and that he will launch a Racial War and Crusade.”
Lin’s arrest was the latest example in a series of what the authorities say are racially motivated threats and possible attacks by violent domestic extremists that have received renewed attention amid a spate of mass shootings and other violence. “Domestic violent extremists collectively pose a steady threat of violence and economic harm to the United States,” the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said at a Senate hearing last month.
Nearly all of those extremists are young white men. Some target their victims because of their ethnic heritage, such as the gunman who killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso on Aug. 3. The suspect has said he was targeting Mexicans who frequented the store near the Texas border.
The El Paso suspect also wrote an antiimmigration manifesto using language echoing that of Trump, who drew protests when he visited the city after the massacre. Democrats have accused Trump of stirring racial hatred as he fills his public remarks with fear-stoking language and sometimes false rhetoric.
The authorities have also arrested two men in Ohio, a state of growing concern for FBI domestic terrorism investigators, in the weeks since a man walked into a Dayton bar and shot 26 people in half a minute, killing nine.
One of the men arrested in Ohio was accused of stockpiling weapons and ammunition and touting the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, as he made threats against Planned Parenthood. The other hinted at an attack on a local Jewish community center, prosecutors said, and had anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda inside his house.
Federal agents this month also charged a Las Vegas man who, they said, had discussed attacking a synagogue and had bomb-making materials at home. Prosecutors said he was also communicating with people who identify with a white supremacist organization.