Radicalized Before They Can Rent a Car
Pardon the brevity of this week's newsletter in advance. I am celebrating my birthday this weekend and traveling back to Abu Dhabi. Upon my return to the city I have some very 46-year-old stuff to handle, including a recovery nap and going to the pharmacy to pick up the Moviprep laxative I need to take in preparation for a colonoscopy on Wednesday.
Speaking of birthdays: as I celebrate my 46th trip around the sun and watch the train to 50 pick up speed (yikes), I want to share my wish list from Libro FM. Even if you are not interested in buying me a book, if you use Amazon’s Audible, consider switching to Libro. I will count that as a gift, because choosing not to support billionaire oligarchs is the kind of present that keeps on giving.
And speaking of colonoscopies, if you are a man of my vintage, this is your reminder that colon and rectal cancer will kill over 50,000 people in the US this year. Get screened if you haven’t.
On to the main event.
In last week's newsletter, we talked about political violence in the US and the spate of killings by men who had been radicalized in the darkest and most toxic corners of the internet. As ever, you all had thoughtful observations about the situation and aspects that I missed or left out. While I did not intend for the list of incidents of political violence that I provided to be a complete catalog, I also was not trying to cherry pick. And the result was a list of attacks that I recalled from memory. However, readers reminded me of two incidents that did not make the list that certainly belonged.
KN Wrote, “I’m wondering if the May 2022 shooting by a white supremacist at a Buffalo grocery store in a predominantly African American neighborhood was an oversight or doesn’t fit your criteria?”
It belongs, especially considering the shooter’s meme filled manifesto was filled with ravings about the Great Replacement Theory and white genocide mainstays of neo-Nazi and far right rhetoric.
Another reader brought up the 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart where a white supremacist neo-Nazi shot 45 people after posting his anti-immigrant manifesto on 8Chan. Both young men were intentional with their targets: Black people in Buffalo and people they perceived to be immigrants in El Paso.
Another regular reader, MD, pointed out that attacks on Black Americans and Jewish communities in the US seem to be escalating in tandem. They continued, “when I look at your list of violence it reinforces for me why Jews and Blacks in the US have had a storied history of collaboration, mutual understanding, and, while sometimes tenuous, an enduring alliance against the white supremacy movement.” MD was correct and their email reminded me of the book Strangers in the Land, by Eric J. Sundquist which has been languishing on my to-read list.
That email also reminded me of Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew, which shows how far-right and neo-Nazi movements were (para)militarized by tens of thousands of angry, disillusioned veterans returning from Korea and Vietnam carrying their tactics and literal manuals with them. I will never understand the “I’m so anti-communist I think I’ll become a Nazi” pipeline, but it has long existed on the fringes of the right.
I think I want to close by saying succinctly the point I was trying to make last week. Fights over the political orientation of the shooter in the Kirk case are a political sideshow. Each of the killers discussed in the last two newsletters are among a not insignificant number of the young men who are having their brains baked in toxic online communities and radicalized into committing acts of violence before their frontal cortex is fully formed. This is exacerbated by a permissive gun culture in which 22 year-olds, who are not deemed responsible enough by rental car companies to be trusted with a Honda Civic, can purchase and bear weapons of war.
This a collective failure and we will not legislate your way out of this.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.