Students of The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines, by Cosimo author Loren Coleman, were probably expecting, in the wake of several recent right-wing terrorist acts in the U.S., to see events precisely like the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC by white supremacist and Holocaust denier James W. von Brunn. In a posting at his blog Twilight Language — where Coleman explores the “coded words,” “name games,” and “number coincidences” that the media inadvertently broadcasts and that subsequently help transform individual events into trends — the author asks whether this is “a time of ‘lone nuts’ or not,” and discusses how the assassination of Kansas doctor George Richard Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder and the shootings of army recruits in Arkansas by American Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who bore a grudge against the U.S. military for the invasion of Iraq, may be connected via their “political-religious undertones.”

The chilling gist of Coleman’s post, however, is how the “twilight language” of von Brunn’s shooting spree may inspire further right-wing violence by those who share the shooter’s philosophies:

James Wenneker von Brunn reportedly was an 88-year-old resident of Maryland. He once lived in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

“Eighty-eight is used as code among Neo-Nazis to identify each other. H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so 88 is taken to stand for HH which in turn means Heil Hitler,” says Wikipedia.

…

Von Brunn reportedly has claimed that the book The Diary of Anne Frank, about a teenage girl’s experiences under Nazi rule, was a hoax. The shooting occurred two days before what would have been Anne Frank’s 80th birthday….

It is also to be noted that the date of June 11, 2001 is the day on which Timothy James McVeigh was executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.