On Friday a man named Everett Miller ambushed and killed two police officers in Kissimmee, Florida. He’s a former Marine who has a history of posting anti-police statements on his Facebook page and may even be a part of the same black separatist group as Gavin Long, the man who killed three Baton Rouge police officers in July, 2016. Here’s how CBS described Miller’s postings:
The early stages of the investigation shows that Miller had made threats to law enforcement on Facebook . . . In the days prior to the shooting, Miller posted several articles on Facebook related to the Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, WKMG reports. Miller’s Facebook page disappeared from the social media website Saturday night.
The Daily Caller has more details:
His posts show anger towards police officers, President Trump, and white people, as well as frustration over the events last week in Charlottesville, where a man attending a white nationalist rally plowed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
“Damn Terrorist…White Terrorist in America. Be on the look out for white males that look like him,” Miller wrote in a post earlier this week along with a photo of James Fields, the 20-year-old white nationalist who has been charged with second-degree murder in Heyer’s death.
Allegedly posting under the name Malik Mohammed Ali, he claimed to be a part of the Moorish Nation, the same black separatist group that Long joined before he ambushed officers in Louisiana.
It’s also possible that Miller was simply insane. He was apparently involuntarily committed at least once prior to the shooting, but the available evidence is more than enough to raise concerns that this was a classic politically-motivated shooting. Indeed, if he was a white nationalist with an equivalent history of extremism the shooting would already be on lists of far-right extremist violence.
As I wrote last week, there is a disturbing tendency for activist groups (and the government) to treat the extremist threat as if it comes only from jihadists or the far-right. Yet the recent wave of anti-police killings and ambushes easily meets the FBI definition of terrorism: “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
Any comprehensive study of extremist violence in the United States should include the recent spike in politically-motivated anti-police ambushes, and it appears that last Friday America may well have experienced yet another tragic far-left attack.