By Hunter Wallace

In the aftermath of the Dylann Roof shooting in Charleston, I calmed everyone and made a prediction: within the next two months, I predicted that there would be another mass shooter in the US with a different set of motives, and that it would have nothing to do with the Confederate Battle Flag. A month later, the jihadist Muhammad Abdulazeez went on his rampage shooting in Chattanooga.

Since then, a number of events have happened that are a cause for serious alarm: dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Confederate monuments have been vandalized, a black shooter opened fire on a Confederate flag rally in Ocala, FL, the #NoFlaggingChallenge has taken the vandalism of Confederate flags onto private property, there have been cases of rocks and bottles being thrown at Confederate flag parades or guns pointed at pro-Confederate demonstrators, and we know of at least three black-on-white mob attacks over the Confederate flag in Columbia, SC and Texas.

In the midst of this Southern Kristallnacht, the murder of Anthony Hervey near Oxford (which we expect to be confirmed soon), the Atlanta City Council’s vote to vandalize Stone Mountain (more on that later), and now the actions of this group of blacks in Memphis, who “symbolically” attempted to dig up Nathan Bedford Forrest from his grave, threatening to bring “a back hoe” and “tractors” to “raise Bedford Forrest from the soil of Memphis” should the State of Tennessee (likely) quash their iconoclasm this fall, are provocations on a whole new level.

Let me go record here with my next prediction: if this isn’t brought to an end soon and continues to escalate, someone out there is going to decide to fight back and turn to violence. I can’t predict when or where it will happen. I can’t predict what will happen, or how it will happen, but the atmosphere is increasingly ripe for violence. To draw an analogy here, its like when you look outside in North Alabama and can tell that a tornado is coming without having to turn on The Weather Channel.

To put it mildly, there are countless people out there like Dylann Roof who lack self control and who are probably even more heavily armed than he was. The leftwing media, political opportunists on the Left, gutless Republicans, and bloodthirsty minority groups have done everything in their power since Charleston to polarize and assure that new Dylann Roofs are created. In the aftermath of Charleston, the entire country with the exception of the most extreme, sociopathic fringe of White Nationalists, condemned what Roof did in Charleston and sympathized with the victims. It could and should have ended there.

Dylann Roof’s stated goal in Charleston was to ignite a race war. There are obviously many in the black community like the New Black Panthers who have long wanted a race war themselves for their own reasons and who are going out of their way in Memphis to provoke one.

I can see it happening in several ways:

1.) It could start with a simple rock or bottle thrown, or maybe a gunshot, at a truck with a Confederate flag, at which point the owner of the truck could return fire with his AR-15.

2.) It could easily start in a fight at a political demonstration in which a White man is assaulted like in Columbia, but turns out to be carrying and opens fire.

3.) It could start when a group of thugs are caught vandalizing a Confederate monument and it ends in a gun fight.

4.) It could start when another lone wolf like Dylann Roof decides he has had enough and decides to go out in a blaze of glory.

5.) It could start at a demonstration in which blacks open fire on pro-Confederate demonstrators in a place like Birmingham.

There are any number of plausible, realistic scenarios in which that shoe could drop. It wouldn’t be a bolt out of the blue either. We’re powerless to forestall such a chain of events, but this atmosphere of anti-Southern hate has become so frightening that we are issuing a warning.

Black mob violence, whether it assumes the color of law (Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta) or takes place outside the boundaries of law (Ferguson, Baltimore, Columbia) or is tolerated by authorities (the Obama administration), must be reigned in by a higher authority to defuse this explosive atmosphere before it escalates any further.

Note: Once again, let me reiterate the C of CC deplores violence and would like to see this animosity abate before any further damage is inflicted on historic monuments. Outrageous provocations of this sort though have us worried that politicians are allowing racial tensions to spiral out of control.