Late last week, Derek Klever, a paralegal at the Queens district attorney’s office, was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat, among other things, for allegedly plotting to build and plant a homemade bomb. Sometimes, the people who engage in these would-be attacks leave their motives somewhat mysterious, or seem to have motivations that are only unintelligible to them for reasons of interpersonal animus or lost touch with reality, among others. Not in this case; Klever was very clear about who he was targeting and why. It was not a particular person he felt had wronged him, but a demographic: migrants living at the small temporary shelter near his apartment in Elmhurst. According to court filings, the Klever had told an acquaintance that he “shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s for Queens County” and that he wished that he had enough explosive to “blow them back to Venezuela,” a sentiment that doesn’t particularly square with his also saying he did not intend to kill them. As an idle thought, it’d be bad enough, but Klever allegedly went to action, clumsily attempting to make a bomb with fireworks, nails and gasoline. It’s a good thing that the paralegal seemed neither particularly good at keeping his mouth shut or making explosives, otherwise this story might have had a more tragic ending. It doesn’t seem at this stage like Klever was working with anyone on his plot, but that doesn’t mean he was acting completely alone in the way someone annoyed at their boss or haunted by imaginary demons is. He was immersed in relatively mainstream political rhetoric asserting that immigrants are a danger, that they are a threat to the country and its way of life, that they could in some meaningful way destroy NYC or the United States as a whole. There’s a tendency for figures on the extreme right, particularly those making their name on anti-immigrant agitation, to claim that they have no responsibility for people taking their lies and hate at face value and acting on the clear implications of their rhetoric. Let’s be clear that we should not go down the road of laying the actions of a few isolated extremists wholly at the feet of certain political speakers; anyone with some public platform could well have their words twisted by some madman. Yet it’s absolutely true that having any kind of influence brings with it some responsibility, and those who’ve been banging the drum about some nonexistent migrant danger cannot now just wash their hands of all responsibility when people actually listen. This starts at the very loudest and most prominent such figure, Donald Trump himself, who over his near-decade in politics has pushed relentlessly to move the rhetoric on anti-immigration policy back decades, to an era where it was acceptable to simply denigrate entire ethnicities and nations in the basest, most alarmist terms. So we can hope that Klever was the only person hoping to visit terror on our city as a result of the conviction that migrants are a scourge and he needs to “teach them a lesson,” as he allegedly said. But unfortunately, as long as prominent media and political figures keep fanning the flames, the fire will rage.