Last week, a white supremacist from Dallas drove to El Paso, Texas, and murdered 20 people in a mass shooting.
In the opening of his four-page racist screed, he wrote, “I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” referencing a white supremacist who killed 51 Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand, adding, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
In similar incidents, a white supremacist killed three members of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in 2014. A white supremacist murdered nine black congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015. A white anti-Semite murdered 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Penn., in October. One woman was killed and three injured, including a rabbi, by a shooter at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., in April.
Last month, a shooter opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California, killing four. Prior to the shooting, he posted anti-Semitic comments and referred to a 19th century proto-fascist book popular among neo-Nazis. Such attacks on racial and religious minorities should not be seen as isolated tragedies but as fundamental attacks on our republic.
The debate over gun rights and gun control cannot be solved in an 18-inch editorial in a small-town paper but will have to be fleshed out by lawmakers, voters and the courts.
But what unites these shooters is that they planned their attacks based on the political ideology of white supremacy, much of which was fostered on little-known corners of the internet where white supremacists freely espouse hate anonymously.
While American political theater is no stranger to public hyperbole and vitriol, racist internet forums allow users to share private comments they would never say in public, protected by online anonymity. Users create silos of hate fostering more hate, radicalizing young, socially isolated white men, as they become emboldened and encouraged by online cowards and turn into killers.
The majority of people who spout hate speech online will not turn violent, but as more and more coalesce on the same concentrated forum or website, it is only a matter of time until someone reading dehumanizing statements about religious, ethnic or racial minorities decides to act out violently.
The dehumanization of our neighbors runs across a wide spectrum. Here, in Sedona’s last election, residents witnessed how this online disassociation allowed cowardly bullies to vomit digital vitriol, but turn tail and cower when confronted in public.
These online hate forums do not offer such public means to shame bullies and prevent real-world violence because the users are anonymous.
When politicians seemingly repeat what these white supremacists have read online, or endorse racist views they believe, they view such statements as validation that their hate is justified. Some Arizona elected officials have recently made statements seemingly endorsing racist and white supremacist viewpoints or embracing ties to white nationalist groups. Until recently, such statements would have been deemed unthinkable and political suicide, but our hyperpartisan political environment has allowed officials to flirt with white nationalism while claiming it is merely hyperbolic or nonviolent political rhetoric, not racism or hate speech. Radicalized mass shooters do not understand the nuance.
Our country is an experiment in freedom with the foundation of that freedom enshrined as equality before the law, regardless of race, religion, color or creed.
We had to fight a terrible civil war to learn that lesson. Our fathers and grandfathers fought racial supremacists last century so that we would not have to now.
We should not let their sacrifices on the battlefield be in vain. We can disagree, vigorously so, but we should have the courage to say in person what we say online. If we do not have the backbone to say what we write online to a crowd of our neighbors, we should not write it online in the shadows. White supremacy and the violence that follows it is a simmering threat to our nation, which was built not based on blood or skin color or ethnicity, but upon the shared belief that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights.
“Life” comes first for a reason.
Christopher Fox Graham Managing Editor
