Ordinary Madness or Political Extremism?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

 

The hostage-taking by British Islamist Malik Faisal Akram at Temple Beth Israel in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs raises some familiar questions: Why was Akram, an extremist who was already known to British intelligence, allowed into the United States at all? Where did he get his gun? Why do so many progressives and agents of the government play down the antisemitic character of antisemitic attacks?

 

But there is another question that is of interest here: Where is the line between ordinary madness — meaning mental illness pure and simple — and political extremism?

 

Mental illness is sometimes offered as an exculpatory consideration by political extremists who do not wish to be corporately discredited by the actions of one of their wilder followers. Consider the case of John C. Salvi III, who killed two people and wounded five more in two shootings at abortion facilities in Massachusetts. Salvi was, without question, an anti-abortion extremist. But he was also a lunatic who was obsessed with a complex conspiracy theory involving the Vatican, currency manipulation, the Mafia, Freemasons, and more. He was a familiar American kind of lunatic, and it may be the case — I think it is likely — that it was his mental illness that drove him to shocking violence rather than his anti-abortion beliefs per se. Abortion opponents (I am one) do not wish to see our efforts soiled by the violent actions of a madman, and that is reasonable. But, at the same time, there are anti-abortion extremists who countenance shootings and bombings and who are not afflicted with some particular mental illness. The madness doesn’t come out of nowhere or explode in a cultural vacuum.

 

The sort of delusional conspiracy thinking that fascinated Salvi also fascinates millions of Americans, and has for years, as you can see in the literature and proceedings of the John Birch Society, the Lyndon LaRouche movement, flat-Earthers, Marxists who rave about the United Fruit Company or Halliburton or the Carlyle Group, and, most recently, in the sacking of the Capitol by people motivated by the interlinked and interdependent conspiracy theories of QAnon and the Donald Trump faction. A few of those extremists are mentally ill, but most of them are not — they are spiritually sick but psychiatrically fit.

 

The connection between madness and extremism runs both ways. Madmen are attracted to extremism, and almost every political movement an inch outside the mainstream has a handful of lunatics attached to it — you can see it at a Bernie Sanders speech, and you can see it at the RNC. Gore Vidal spent most of his life advocating some pretty rotten political ideas, but it was at the end of his life, when his mental faculties were failing him, that he slipped into the familiar terrain and tenor of conspiracy, in his case pushing a half-baked story involving Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, FBI director Louis Freeh, and the Catholic organization Opus Dei, whose spooky-sounding Latin name and institutional opacity make it a favorite of conspiracy cranks. Perhaps there was always a seed of madness in Gore Vidal that shaped his radical politics; perhaps his radical politics were a culture in which his madness grew. Which is the seed and which is the soil is difficult to say. The case of the great poet Ezra Pound and his dedication to Italian fascism raises similar questions.

 

In a world without Islamism, a man such as Malik Faisal Akram might have found some other distant moon to which to hitch his lunacy. Perhaps in some far-away corner of the multiverse, all tremble at the thought of radicalized Presbyterians. If Akram hadn’t spent his life in an environment imbued with antisemitism, he might have instead taken hostages at an elementary school or a post office. It is impossible to say, though we should be mindful of the ways in which the actions of figures such as Representative Ilhan Omar are entrenching antisemitism and the antisemitic conspiracist sensibility here at home.

 

Akram might have gone another way in another world. But we do not live in a world without Islamism or Islamist antisemitism. These are known quantities and pose particular threats with which we have grown all too familiar — irrespective of any intersection with mental illness as such. We should be blocking the entry of figures such as Malik Faisal Akram into our country as a necessary prophylactic measure, and it is not as though we lack the technical capacity for communicating with our allies abroad or the legitimate discretion to take a hard line when it comes to foreign nationals with extremist associations. Perhaps Malik Faisal Akram would have benefited from better mental-health care. That is a British problem — the American problem is stopping such threats at the border.