The most terrifying thing about this is that they've only cut the head off a single hydra. Y'all Qaeda is so much bigger and more dangerous than most Americans realize, and all these groups are just waiting for somebody to make the first move. Nobody wants to be the ones to kick it off, but there are thousands of people around the country just like the thirteen arrested for this, who are just itching to make the shitty, stupid, racist action movie in their heads into a reality.

Unfortunately for all us, there's a strong argument to be made that we're way past the tipping point of being a "failed state."

Medium ran a couple of very interesting articles by a Sri Lankan fellow recently, linked here and here, and Beau of the Fifth Column has spoken at length about it:

Quick edit to add something else:

I think often about my mother, who's getting up there in age, and I think demonstrates a type of thinking common among American retirees and other older folks: she keeps asking "who's funding it all?"

She sees protests on TV, and sees stories like this one, and news clips about far-right groups doing awful thing after awful thing, and she keeps asking "where does the money come from?"

I think that she, like many older Americans, lives in a world where big problems have to have big sources. Where there has to be a shadowy cabal running things, because the ideas of decentralized hate and groups that share nothing but ideology is too alien to her. She, and many others, can't believe that you can just go to the store and buy the tools of hate on sale, they can't conceive of a world where you can just walk into a store and walk out with everything you need to kidnap and execute a governor. They see these problems and think "when this happens overseas, it's always Russia or China or the CIA supplying weapons and training, so who's doing this here?" and they're completely unable to conceive of the idea that no, this is just how America is now, and there's nobody running it, not explicitly like you think.