Last week, the zoning board in Bayonne, New Jersey—just across New York Harbor from Sunset Park, Brooklyn—voted to deny a variance to Muslim residents who wanted to convert a warehouse into a mosque. The hearing had been moved to Bayonne High School, to accommodate a large crowd, and wound up lasting six hours. When a group of Muslims stood to pray as the meeting convened, a group of Christians stood “in response” and recited the Lord’s Prayer, according to the Times. At the microphone, one opponent of the proposed mosque asked the board to press its organizers on what they believed. Another read violent passages out of the Koran. One woman asked, “How many people have died because of this so-called religion?” There was testimony from Coptic Christians whose relatives had been murdered by Muslims in Egypt, and who wanted that violence kept away from Bayonne. The mosque’s supporters needed five votes, but they got only four. “The Muslim Brotherhood was brought up in this meeting, for chrissakes,” someone said early on. The great New Jersey political reporter Matt Katz, now of WNYC, pointed out that this countering of the grandiose with the profane was “the Jersey-est thing said so far.”

While watching footage of the board meeting, it was hard not to notice the urgency among the mosque’s opponents, their sense that the hearing had presented a chance to make an essential stand. “You are our last hope,” one man told the zoning board. The applicants had selected an unobtrusive site for the proposed mosque. The building they wanted to convert was “an empty 8,500-square-foot warehouse at the end of a dead-end block,” as the Times put it. But it was in an area that was zoned for residential use, and so required a public variance to convert. The three members of the zoning board who blocked the variance suggested that they would be open to a mosque elsewhere in the city and that their concerns were about the particular neighborhood, but this was hard to square with the angry and expansive rhetoric from the project’s opponents.

One line of thought, supported by some statistical analysis, is that anti-immigrant sentiment after Brexit and Donald Trump’s election has been most potent in places with the least exposure to actual immigrants. This is, in a sense, a heartwarming suggestion, since it leaves open the possibility that minds can be changed by human interaction. But Bayonne, which voted for Hillary Clinton by a margin of three to two, is not at all like that. New Jersey has one of the highest proportions of Muslims of any state in the country, 3.3 per cent, and there are more than half a dozen mosques in Jersey City, which borders Bayonne. Newark, nearby, has a Muslim deputy mayor. The people who aired civilizational broadsides at the Bayonne zoning board were not talking about an unknowable religion half a world away, glimpsed only through cable news. They were talking about their neighbors.

The number of hate crimes and bias incidents has probably increased since the election, especially in large cities. But it is a complicated log, in which some acts seem symbolic and others impulsive, some aimed at a national community and others much more personal. There have been so many threats phoned into Jewish community centers and synagogues (about a hundred and fifty since the election) that at first they seemed to represent a grassroots phenomenon. The intelligence now suggests that they are coördinated. Last Sunday, John Miller, the head of the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence division, said on “CBS This Morning” that the threats appeared to be overwhelmingly the work of one man, using a device that changes his voice and another that makes it difficult for authorities to trace his number. (There have been a few copycats, Miller said, among them the St. Louis journalist Juan Thompson, who allegedly made eight threats as part of a plot to implicate his ex-girlfriend.) If Miller is right, then these threats might represent something less than a popular surge of anti-Semitism. “We have an offender with some technical prowess here,” Miller said. The intent in making so many threats seemed to be to terrorize; the perpetrator whom Miller described had some of the anonymous malevolence of the Internet troll.

In the week after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded about a hundred bias threats each day, but by early December that number had dropped to about half a dozen. Coming immediately after Trump’s surprise victory, the attacks, many of which took place at universities, suggested a bristling nationalist euphoria. At San Diego State University, a female student was robbed by men who “made comments about Donald Trump and the Muslim community”; at N.Y.U.’s engineering school, Muslim students awoke after the election to find that someone had scrawled “Trump!” on their dorm door; at San Jose State, a Muslim woman student reported that a “fair-skinned” man she did not know had yanked off her hijab, throwing off her balance and choking her. There was a personal quality to these encounters, and their targets seemed often to be Muslim-Americans within a particular community.

The most violent and disturbing hate crimes since the election have had more in common with these attacks than with the widespread threats against synagogues and mosques. In August, a Lebanese-American man named Khalid Jabara was killed on his doorstep by a white neighbor who had harassed the family for years, calling them “dirty Arabs.” On February 22nd, in a sports bar in Olathe, a Kansas City suburb, a Navy veteran named Adam Purinton confronted two Indian-born aerospace engineers at a bar and demanded to know their immigration status. Escorted from the bar, he returned half an hour later with a handgun and shot both men, killing one and injuring the other and a patron who tried to intervene. A few hours later, just before he was apprehended, Purinton told an acquaintance that he believed that the men were Iranian.

On March 3rd, in Kent, Washington, a stocky, masked white man walked up to a suburban driveway, where an Indian-American man named Deep Rai, a Sikh, was working on his car. The masked man told Rai to “go back to your own country” and shot him in the arm. On March 6th, an Indian-born man named Harnish Patel, a convenience-store owner, was fatally shot outside his house in Lancaster, South Carolina. In that case, investigators have disclosed so little that it isn’t clear that it was a hate crime at all.

If the emotion guiding these attacks was specifically anti-Muslim, or anti-Semitic, we would expect the targets to be more precisely chosen. Instead, although at least two of the four victims were assumed to be Muslim, none of them actually were. They were attacked not in places of worship but in suburban neighborhoods and a sports bar, where their attackers told them they did not belong. Unlike the calls to the Jewish community centers, the shootings do not seem to have been carefully planned to terrorize a particular group. If the assailants imagined themselves as martyrs, they might not have tried to escape, as all of them did. These shootings seem impulsive, not coördinated by any extremist group, and the idea they have advertised is simple: that outsiders are not welcome here.

Trump and the nationalist wing of the Republican Party have announced a great struggle (“Let’s Make Western Civilization Great Again!” the hardline Iowa congressman Steve King tweeted on Monday evening), but it is a struggle in which there is no obvious way for ordinary citizens to take part. National Guardsmen are not being sent to Raqqa; militias are not being summoned to the southern border. Some of this intensity has been displaced into local neighborhoods. One reason that the apocalyptic talk of civilizational struggle surfaced in the NIMBY theatre of a suburban zoning-board hearing may be that they share a common thread. They are efforts to exert local control.