JUSTIN GLAWE

Our online lives are often curated to paint the best possible portrait of the reality of our existence. But in the case of many Americans, what we put on our various profiles and feeds reflects a troubling descent into conspiratorial political madness.

That’s the case for Dalton Mattus, a 34-year-old Pekin man facing federal charges for being caught with homemade pipe bombs when he was pulled over by police in May. Without Mattus’ online postings, that’s about as much as the public might have known about the welder and father of one young son. Luckily — or unluckily, as it’s a troubling sign of deep distress among right-wing Americans — Mattus was a prolific poster of the type of conspiratorial political content that has consumed many of our friends and neighbors.

As the politics of lies in the wake of Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 spread across the country, Mattus joined a disturbing number of Americans who have begun to accept political violence as a necessary path not just to power, but to preserving their freedoms in their everyday lives. Mattus was ready “to go to civil war,” he wrote in September 2020 — one of two times he mentioned the prospect of armed conflict between Americans in hundreds of online posts I reviewed.

Mattus was arrested early on the morning of May 21, riding in the passenger seat of a vehicle in Pekin. Under his seat, police found a locked bag. Mattus told officers they’d have to get a warrant to unlock the bag, and they let him go. Inside Pekin City Hall, the officers obtained a warrant and unlocked the bag. Inside, they found two homemade pipe bombs and a pistol. After a brief standoff at Mattus’ apartment, Pekin police took him into custody. Inside the apartment, police found as many as 11 more bombs either completed or under construction. Mattus now faces weapons and other charges in Peoria, where his case is slowly playing out in federal court.

I had not heard of Mattus’ arrest until someone who follows my work documenting right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy pointed me toward Mattus’ Facebook page. There, I found a litany of rants and posts about every right-wing conspiracy imaginable, from the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump, to government-tainted food and drinking water, government seizure of Americans’ guns, lies about the COVID-19 pandemic, and on and on. As I went backward through Mattus’ screeds from the time of his arrest to before 2020 — when the American right’s propensity for conspiracies was set ablaze by the pandemic and racial justice protests — it quickly became clear to me that Mattus hadn’t always been this way. In fact, before 2020, he had not posted anything remotely political.

But at some point that year, Mattus began a descent into radicalization. This was primarily fueled by Facebook and, later, TikTok — social media platforms whose algorithms feed us what we want to see, free of fact and truths as that so often is. Over the course of the next four years, Mattus’ posts became more frequent and his rants more unhinged. He became a far-right, anti-government conspiracist who believed his very life and freedoms were under threat.

In an incredibly fraught election year, men like Mattus could be a symbol of things to come. Openly clamoring for civil war or armed conflict has become something of a hallmark of the online right. So, I wrote up my findings for Rolling Stone under the headline, “‘Ready for Civil War’: Illinois Man Arrested With Bombs Posted Right-Wing Content.” How odd it was to be writing about a man not far from my own age, not far from my hometown of Peoria, who had taken such a different turn in his life than I had.

I don’t know what, if anything, Mattus was planning with all those bombs. Maybe nothing, or maybe he just wanted to be ready to go when his fever dream of a government takeover of America finally came to fruition. Authorities have not said whether they have uncovered a plan for destruction of any kind, and federal court documents have revealed nothing that we didn’t already know in late May following Mattus’ arrest. But men like Mattus seem to be themselves ticking time bombs. Goaded ever onward by the humming engine of online algorithms, they feed on content that enrages them. Once primed, it doesn’t take much — and sometimes nothing at all — to push them over the edge to take violent action.

Mattus just happened to get pulled over on a random morning in Pekin, caught with his weapons of political violence, before he could act on his fantasies of fighting a tyrannical government. But he won’t be the last person to be radicalized online. All the right-wing news outlets and influencers who fed Mattus the rage-bait that apparently spun him into conspiratorial hysteria are still online, still filling the feeds of millions of Americans, still building even more human political bombs.

Justin Glawe is a Peoria native who lives in Savannah, Ga. He founded the website American Doom, which covers “chaos, corruption, conspiracies + threats to democracy.”