Confronting the evil of white supremacy
Americans have a crucial role to play in rooting out this awful ideology
On Saturday, in the Texas border town of El Paso, a young white supremacist opened fire at a Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring dozens more. His intention, per a manifesto he left on the website 8chan, was to exact revenge against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” to forestall what he called “cultural and ethnic replacement” and to “reclaim [ the] country from destruction.” His actions, he confirmed in the first line, were inspired by “the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” The killer was the second gunman to cite Christchurch as an inspiration in the last six months. In the internet era, malevolence tends to echo.
During the Cold War, Ian Fleming observed that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” So it is here.
In America, as abroad, we see our fair share of inexplicable violence. But the patterns on display over the last few years have revealed that we are contending here not with another “lone wolf,” but with the fruit of a murderous and resurgent ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities in the same manner as has been the
threat posed by militant Islam.
We will see a myopic focus on guns in the coming days, tied to a broader discussion of America’s “mass shooting problem.” This will be a mistake — not because America does not have such a problem, but because to focus on limiting a certain tool in a country with half a billion of those tools in circulation and a constitutional provision protecting their ownership is to set oneself up for guaranteed failure.
Addressing the problem will require a number of different approaches, some broad, some narrow. President Donald Trump, a man who is comfortable using his bully pulpit for the most frivolous of reasons, should take the time to condemn these actions repeatedly and unambiguously, in both general and specific terms.
Simultaneously, the president should work with Congress to devote more resources to infiltrating, tracking and foiling nascent plots, and he should instruct the federal government to initiate an information campaign against white supremacist violence.
Just as the government must not react to these incidents by abridging the Second Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, obviously the First Amendment’s crucial protections must also remain intact. But where action is consistent with the law — there is no prohibition on monitoring hotbeds of radicalism, nor against punishing those who plan or incite violence — it must be vigorously taken.
In concert, Americans must recognize that they have a crucial role to play in rooting out this awful ideology and in superintending the places in which it spreads.
Americans take it upon themselves to spot the early warning signs of radicalization and do whatever they are able to discourage it That is their prerogative. Here, as elsewhere, the best prophylactic against mass killings is individual intervention and social responsibility.
Alas, technology has made it tougher, not easier, to address threats such as this. It is one thing for undercover agents to infiltrate a militia or a terrorist cell in the hopes of taking action before a plot can be brought to fruition, but it is quite another to track a series of dispersed and unaffiliated actors who may or may not be in the process of adopting a radicalizing ideology that they have encountered online.
In the space of a century, our mission has gone from tracking men in uniform who happily lined up in marked trenches, to tracking semi- ironic lost boys floating around the ether. But while the tactics have changed, the rest has not.
Now, as ever, evil is evil and murder is murder, and we gain nothing by refusing to call them by their names.