For the most part all extremists are small but vocal minorities, it’s just that highly partisan media outlets have managed to trick people into thinking they support political stances that they really don’t. It’s not just the reactionaries, but the reactionaries are far “better” at it than the left because they’ve absolutely mastered the ability to manipulate people’s fears and amplify them and fear-driven people tend to lean right anyway.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that those small, vocal minorities that weren’t ever going to do anything but write angry treatises and argue with people on the Internet, eventually start attracting people who are certifiably ill, and who will, with a little provocation, do terrible things.
That’s where people like Breivik and Roof come from. Deeply troubled, socially withdrawn people are drawn to extremist ideologies like moths to a flame, and in many cases, the people peddling those ideologies know that. It’s the exact same strategy used by evil bastards the world over, from cult leaders to the taliban.
The problem has always been there, it’s just that it’s different now than it was 30 years ago. The guy who poisoned Tylenol bottles, for example, nobody knows who it was, or why they did it, it was a random act of violence likely motivated by a confabulated internal narrative. Maybe the killer thought the company had hurt him, maybe he thought it was hurting other people, we’ll never really know.
What has changed is the fact that the Internet now makes it easy for those evil bastards to connect with the unwell people that they plan to use as pawns, and that accessibility not only accounts for the increase in overtly politically/racially based violence, but also the general increase in frequency and visibility. Extremist “causes” that would have otherwise languished in obscurity are now just a Google search away, the exhausting speed of the news cycle means that more people hear about the things done in the name of those causes, both of which combine to create a false image of the size of the groups behind them.
Hell, even just me sitting here explaining this is part of the problem. There’s always a chance that someone will read this, and it will make them feel a little uncomfortable because it hits a little too close to home. Their reaction might be honest self-evaluation, or it might be to shut it out and say, “well they are just a left wing pontificator who thinks I’m an idiot and wants to hurt me!” That might be all it takes to send someone who might have been thinking about seeing someone about their problems spiraling down into a psychological hole they may never get out of–not because I said anything particularly offensive, but because it was just the push they needed to decide that the world is out to get them.
Once the racing conspiracy thought process starts, it’s pretty hard for anyone to stop.