By David French
Monday, August 05, 2019
It’s time to face some dreadful, terrible facts. The
United States is now facing a deadly challenge from a connected, radical,
online-organizing community of vicious white-nationalist terrorists. They are
every bit as evil as jihadists, and they radicalize in much the same way. And
just like the ISIS terrorists our nation and our allies have confronted in the
great cities of the West, they use the most modern of tools to advance the
oldest of hatreds.
America has faced waves of white-supremacist terror in
the past, and there are always at least some, few extremists lurking in the
dark corners of American life. We’ve come to expect the occasional act of
white-supremacist violence, and we’ve sometimes explained it away as the last
spasm of a dying bigotry.
Beginning in 2015, however, it became apparent to those
who had eyes to see that our nation was starting to experience a new youth
movement of hate. The Charleston church massacre was followed by a strange —
and for those who experienced it — terrifying wave of bizarre online racist
harassment. The word “alt-right” entered the American lexicon.
It targeted Jews, it targeted African Americans and
Hispanics, and it targeted critics of Donald Trump. It obsessed over immigrants
from south of the border. It used words like “invasion” to describe
immigration, and words such as “replacement” to describe the imagined fate of
white America. It thrilled to Trump’s rhetoric, and parts of Trump’s movement
loved it right back. No less a figure than Steve Bannon, the man who became
Trump campaign CEO and later a senior White House aide, boasted that Breitbart
(then one of the most trafficked sites in conservative media) had become the
“platform of the alt-right.”
Critics who sounded the alarm about the alt-right were
often mocked. You just didn’t get it. They were “trolls.” They were doing it
for the “lulz.” In the meantime, their targets hired security when they could
afford it, carried guns when they couldn’t, and got used to living on edge.
Then, the “trolls” found their way into the real world.
In 2017, a young man drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters in
Charlottesville, Va., killing a young woman named Heather Heyer. One of the
“trolls” — connected to other trolls across the globe — armed himself,
slaughtered worshippers in two New Zealand mosques, and filmed the attack. He posted
a rambling manifesto to an online message board called 8chan.
The next month, a young man in California armed himself,
posted his own 8chan manifesto, and tried to slaughter worshippers in a
California synagogue. And yesterday, another young man posted another 8chan
manifesto and committed a mass murder in El Paso, Texas.
And if you think that’s the sum total of
white-supremacist violence, you’re sadly mistaken. Most Americans remember the
Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. Do you remember the white
supremacist who killed a black man in New York with a sword? Do you remember
the attempted church massacre in Kentucky, where a white supremacist who
couldn’t gain access to the church gunned down two black victims at a Kroger
grocery story instead? Do you remember that a member of an “alt-Reich” Facebook
group stabbed a black Maryland college student to death without provocation, or
that a white man in Kansas shouted ethnic slurs before shooting two Indian
engineers in a bar, killing one?
Substitute “jihadist” for “white supremacist” or “white
nationalist” and then imagine how we’d act. Imagine how we’ve acted.
It’s time to declare war on white-nationalist terrorism.
It’s time to be as wide awake about the dangers of online racist radicalization
as we are about online jihadist inspiration. And it’s time to reject the public
language and rhetoric that excites and inspires racist radicals. Just as we
demanded from our Muslim allies a legal and cultural response to the hate in
their midst, we should demand a legal and cultural response to the terrorists
from our own land.
To say that it’s time to declare war does not mean it’s
time to repeal the Constitution. Nor does it mean droning a young man in his
mom’s basement in Des Moines. It means treating online white-nationalist
radicals exactly the way we treat online jihadist sympathizers.
The FBI is hardly passive. Last month, FBI director
Christopher Wray told Congress that the FBI had made “about 90” domestic terror
arrests in the last nine months, and a “majority” are motivated by
“white-supremacist violence.” Aside from making “domestic terrorism” a federal
crime (federal terrorism crimes focus on international terrorism), the federal
response is mainly one of resource allocation. It’s time to shake free greater
resources from the Department of Justice, with greater emphasis in its myriad
joint terrorism task forces on the white-nationalist threat.
And we can’t forget the mass-shooting element of
white-nationalist terror. We’ll learn more about the El Paso terrorist (and the
more-mysterious Dayton shooter) in the coming days, but we know from all too
many previous mass shootings that these vile murderers not only often give
warning signs but that the legal tools to help a person in obvious psychological
distress are often inadequate.
After the Parkland school shooting, I advocated a form of
gun control called a “gun-violence restraining order,” also known as a
“red-flag law.” Essentially, they allow designated individuals (family members,
employers, educators) to file a request in court for an order temporarily
removing firearms from a dangerous individual. Properly drafted, they provide
for due process and require compelling, admissible evidence. The great virtue
of these laws is that they’re focused on individual misconduct, not on
(ineffective) collective punishment of the vast law-abiding majority of
gun-owners.
But law enforcement isn’t enough. Targeted gun control
isn’t enough. Culture matters. Since 9/11 we have asked that Muslim leaders not
just condemn terrorism but reject the extremist ideologies and extremist
rhetoric that inspire and energize jihadists.
Why? It’s too simple to say that anti-Semitic or
anti-American rhetoric causes violence. After all, the number of people
who commit acts of violence is still a tiny proportion of those who are exposed
to hateful speech. No, it’s a bit more complex than that.
Members of a radicalized underground often work
diligently to introduce their themes and ideas into public discourse. They want
to kill, yes, but they also want to change the culture. When national leaders
use their rhetoric or adopt their themes, it is thrilling. It is energizing. It
is inspiring to the movement. It tells them that they just might win.
Think of the thrills, energy, and inspiration they’ve
experienced from the highest office in the land — and from parts of the most
popular cable network in the land — since Trump came down the escalator in
2015. His announcement speech cast immigrants collectively as dangerous and deficient,
with only “some” exceptions. He has used the language of invasion frequently,
even to the point of invoking a military response:
Many Gang Members and some very bad
people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go
back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the
legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting
for you!
Voices on Fox News have even said that migrant caravans
carried with them the threat of importing smallpox (a disease that’s
been eradicated for decades) and leprosy to the United States, or that migrants
are responsible for spreading a “polio-like” disease is that is paralyzing our
children.
Alt-right support for Trump wasn’t random. It wasn’t
arbitrary. It was directly related to his rhetoric, and it was cultivated by
his allies, and it was cultivated in part because it was a new way to fight, to
punch back against the hated Left.
We can and should debate proper levels of immigration,
including debating more immigration restrictions, without using the exact
language and exact claims that energize and inspire an actual racist terrorist
movement. But somehow all too many Americans have convinced themselves that the
only way to “fight” is to use language that is deliberately designed to stoke
fear and rage — that pushes the envelope with the express purpose of enraging
our opposition.
Tell people we face an invasion often enough, and some
people will act according to the ordinary meaning of that term. The El Paso
shooter called immigration an invasion, and he responded in the way that people
historically respond to “invasions” — with armed force.
Political rhetoric is often rough. “Politics ain’t
beanbag,” as the saying goes. But when a nation experiences the wave of mass
killings, threats, harassment, and radicalization we see now, it’s time for
American leaders to respond with unequivocal, relentless messages not just of
condemnation for racists but also with their own words of reconciliation and
national unity.
And that does not mean surrendering a single rational,
good-faith argument about proper levels of immigration. We can and should view
each and every immigrant as a person created in the image of God, but that does
not mean that each and every person should be entitled to enter this country.
It’s worth saying 10,000 times: Fighting for your political values does not
ever require you to abandon decency and respect. In fact, given the magnitude
of the issues at stake, decency is even more urgent. It helps keep emotions
under control.
And if you think the obligation of decency runs only one
way, think again. While we don’t yet know the Dayton shooter’s motives, early
reporting indicates that the Dayton shooter described himself as a leftist,
hated Donald Trump, supported Elizabeth Warren, and once wrote “kill every
fascist.” He condemned “concentration camps” at the border. Angry political
hyperbole that invokes the language of death or the Holocaust is toxic. Period.
This is a pivotal moment in our modern history. Every
wave of terror is dangerous, but waves of racist terror are particularly
dangerous in a nation that was once torn to bloody shreds in large part because
of its repugnant white supremacism.
Law enforcement should pursue terrorists relentlessly.
Policymakers should think creatively. And our nation’s leaders need to focus on
reconciliation and unity, and if they are not up to that most basic and
fundamental aspect of their job, then they must be replaced.
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