Everyone complains that ISIS is more a threat, that they're oh so scary and dangerous, because of this. And I can only find it darkly amusing, because the harder the maslos of the world say that ISIS is a greater threat now that it was before, the more they are wrong and the dumber they look.
It's provable fact that this is a strategy of weakness and desperation, born of the inability to accomplish the goals they originally set out for, trying to stay relevant in a world that's turned against them and as they see their final impotence approach. How?
It's all going the same way that the white supremacists went.
First there was the Ku Klux Klan; they were large, scary, organized, with titles and leadership and members and money. They rose and fell with the times and the perceived need a few times. But people stopped tolerating them eventually. Because they were organized, they were vulnerable. A line of command is a line of responsibility, moral and legal. A leader is one who, when removed, leaves the rest of the organization weaker for their absence. And the power-grabbers all moved in too as the pressure mounted, and there was schism and collapse.
Many groups followed in the wake of it all. Many even named themselves the Klan, and today there are a dozen or more "Klans", most of which are opposed to each other. They were and are dangerous to those who cross their paths on an individual level, but incapable of the massive campaigns of oppression and murder that their forerunner was.
The next to become of true account was the Aryan Nations, in the early '80s. They had a new ideology, Christian Identity, and a new concept, brought to them ironically by someone not of their group who had suffered his own defeats in the traditional area. (It is to this man, Louis Beam, that we owe the very phrase "lone wolves" we use to describe what goes on today, and it is his playbook of "leaderless resistance" that describes how this is all happening.) There would be a central core, but only tenuous ties. They would bring many groups together, forge links, but not command. Encouragement and basic informational help would be offered, but no one would ask and no one would tell. Yet in this environment, less got done, because nobody had to do it. There was plenty of talking a good game, but the scale of action shrank drastically. From lynching and church bombing that was so endemic it passed almost without comment, they were reduced to the occasional murder, shooting up of a community center, and armored car robbery.
Then in the '90s, at the seeming height of their power, their effectiveness suddenly started to wane even as their reach seemingly grew. They were everywhere. But doing little. It began to tell. They started to fissure under increased law enforcement pressure and reduced recruitment in reaction to their "successes" in the late '80s. In 2000 Aryan Nations broke, and never recovered. Like the Klan, there are many remainders, fighting mostly over who is truly Aryan Nations, many of them existing as little more than a website and perhaps a dozen people, and all of them accomplishing little.
There will be no race war, no glorious victory on the field of battle. The dream is dead and the dreamer crippled. All that is left is mindless violence, spastic, uncoordinated, and ultimately small in scope. It is a violence born of hopelessness, not in any sense that there was no hope for the doer, but that there is no hope for it to have meaning, no hope for it accomplish anything. It is violence born of the realization that all they have taken upon themselves and all they stand for will be nullified, and so in a nihilistic last stand they try to nullify a few other people before they too see the sum effort and meaning of their lives come to nothing.
Change a few names and dates and you have the history of Islamic terrorism, from Islamic Jihad to al-Qaeda to Daesh. We're watching these stages play out before our eyes.