Nearly 30 dead as multiple mass shootings hit across the US

[GMDino]

(08-07-2019, 01:56 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: We're probably hearing about it because a decade ago, the Obama administration told us it was a growing threat to our national security, and now our FBI director is telling us it is our greatest terrorism threat in this country, likely because the resources hadn't been devoted to it as they should have been. Now there are reports (not saying whether this is true or not, just things I have read/heard) of federal agents saying there is a hesitance in actually engaging in enforcement with these groups because of POTUS seeing them as his base.

Those are probably some of the factors at play as to why we are primarily hearing about white supremacy right now.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/6/20754828/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-rise

Quote:At various points in the 20th century, white supremacists reacted viciously against continued immigration from ethnic and religious minorities and tried to suppress movements for black civil rights by force. In 1963 alone, they assassinated NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and killed four black girls in a bombing attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.



The 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2017 fatal car attack in Charlottesville, Virginia; the 2018 shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; this weekend’s shooting in El Paso — these are not isolated incidents, but evidence that we are once again in the midst of a wave of white racial violence.


According to data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish anti-hate group, right-wing extremists were responsible for the vast bulk of documented killings by political extremists in the United States in 2018. In late July testimony before the US Senate, FBI Director Christopher Wray reported that the FBI had already made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and, further, that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”


So why is this happening now, and what are the racist killers trying to accomplish?


The answers to these questions are complicated. But at the center of the story is, as it was historically, a sense among white racists that white control over America is slipping.


Rising diversity and the victories of the civil rights movement threatened white dominance, much as white control was threatened by Reconstruction and mass immigration in the past. Faced with these perceived threats, white supremacists have used violence strategically throughout American history to fend off this demographic shift — or, in the words of the El Paso shooter and President Trump, an “invasion” by nonwhites. Today, their goal is to sow terror in nonwhite communities and radicalize whites, and to lay the groundwork for a return to a more explicitly racist political regime in the United States.


So while the current wave of white nationalist violence is new, it is at root part of something very old. And any serious assessment of this history reveals something frightening: that the good guys don’t always win.


Especially when the militants have fellow travelers in positions of power.


Why white supremacist violence is on the rise today


There are a dizzying number of racist hate groups in the United States, many of which have been around for decades, or, in the case of the KKK, more than a century. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counts hundreds of such groups, separated into distinct categories like “white nationalist,” “neo-Confederate,” “neo-Nazi,” and “racist skinhead.”


These groups differ on many points, including the justifiability of violence. But one thing they share is a sense of impending demographic doom: the notion that the United States is a white nation being swamped by mass nonwhite immigration (often described as being orchestrated by a Jewish conspiracy) and higher birthrates among native-born nonwhites. The browning of America — a real phenomenon — has produced a sense of displacement among a nontrivial number of white natives, manifesting in far-right claims about a “white genocide” taking place in America.


“The idea of that threat has been central to white power activism for decades,” Kathleen Belew, a historian of American racist movements at the University of Chicago, writes in the New York Times. “To people in this movement, the impending demographic change understood by many commentators as a soft transformation — the moment when a town, a county, or a nation will no longer be majority-white — isn’t soft at all, but rather represents an apocalyptic threat.”


Historically, power transitions between ethnic groups have led to violence. In his 2002 book Understanding Ethnic Violence, MIT political scientist Roger Petersen argued that ethnic killing is often caused by a particular kind of collective resentment: the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn’t previously held it.


Drawing on social psychology, Petersen argued that one of the underappreciated causes of ethnic violence was a change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups. Members of dominant groups simply believe they deserve to be the dominant force in their societies, and resent those challenging their positions at the top of the pyramid.


A 2010 paper published in the journal World Politics tested Petersen’s theory, looking at 157 cases of ethnic violence in nations ranging from Chad to Lebanon. It found strong statistical correlations between a group’s decline in status and the likelihood that it turns to violence against another group.


Petersen’s research suggests that in advanced democracies, much of this anger will be channeled through the political system rather than mass violence. Hence the rise of Donald Trump, whose voters (particularly in the Republican primary) were disproportionately defined by high levels of racial grievance.


But the mainstream can’t be separated from the extreme quite so cleanly. Indeed, experts think Trump’s rise to power played a crucial role in inspiring the current wave of white nationalist violence — in helping turn inchoate anxiety about demographic change into real, deadly action.


In particular, Trump galvanized the alt-right, the now-infamous group of online racists who were relatively obscure prior to 2015. They stepped up their activity online, with alt-right harassment and trolling becoming ubiquitous on social media in particular.
Coleman Lowndes/Vox


“They perceived him as anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and certainly anti-establishment,” says Mark Pitcavage, an expert on far-right extremism at the ADL. “They liked him quite a bit. So they really came out in force for him.”


This isn’t just Pitcavage’s opinion. One study of 75 far-right radicals found that many of them “credit his candidacy as the start of their awakening.” In his book The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know, University of Alabama professor George Hawley writes that “Trump’s presidential campaign energized the alt-right and helped the movement reach a new audience,” adding that “had Trump never entered the GOP presidential primaries ... the alt-right would not have shown much interest in the 2016 presidential election.”


Press coverage of the rising alt-right presence online helped them get noticed by a wider audience. They also benefited greatly from support on two online troll havens, 4chan and 8chan. These sites, collectively referred to as “the chans,” are defined by racist memeing that’s supposedly ironic but functionally indistinguishable from genuine racism. They’ve evolved into a hub for alt-right fans, used to coordinate trolling campaigns. The more radical 8chan, whose users have been known to praise mass killers, is where the New Zealand mosque shooter, the Poway synagogue attacker, and El Paso shooter all posted their manifestos.


These factors — Trump’s rise, growing media coverage of the alt-right, and the use of the chans as organizing hubs — helped white nationalist ideas spread rapidly online. The more people who are exposed to radical ideas about white America’s demographic doom, the more likely these ideas are to reach a young white man who takes them as justification for violence — especially when there are places on the internet like 8chan openly celebrating it.


“We are in a surge of white supremacy right now,” says Pitcavage. “Whenever you have white supremacists increasing in anger and increasing in numbers, you’re going to see the violence increasing too.”

More at the link.  Long article.