The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 | 5

world

The politics of American gun violence follow a predictable pattern in most cases: outraged calls for action from the left, somber gestures of sympathy from the right, a subdued presidential statement delivered from a prepared text — and then, in a matter of days or even hours, a national turning of the page to other matters. But after a white supremacist gunman massacred 22 people in El Paso, the political world hurtled on Monday toward a more expansive, and potentially more turbulent, confrontation over racist extremism. Though the gun lobby was again on the defensive, it was not alone; so were social media companies and websites like 8chan that have become hives for toxic fantasies and violent ideas that have increasingly leaked into real life, with fatal consequences. Perhaps most of all, President Trump faced intense new criticism and scrutiny for the plain echoes of his own rhetoric in the El Paso shooter’s anti-immigrant manifesto. Mr. Trump’s usual methods of deflec- tion sputtered on Monday: His early- morning tweets attacking the news media and calling vaguely for new back- ground checks on gun purchasers did little to ease the political pressure. A mid- morning statement he recited from the White House — condemning “white supremacy” and warning of internet-fueled extremism, but declining to address his own past language or call for stern new gun regulations — did noth- ing to quiet the chorus of censure from Mr. Trump’s political opponents and critics, who are demanding presidential accountability. No moment better captured how the gun violence debate was giving way to a reckoning on extremism than a statement on Monday afternoon from former President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama, who has weighed in sparingly on public events since leaving office, called both for gun control and for an emphatic national rejection of racism and the people who stoke it. “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments,” Mr. Obama wrote, “leaders who demon- ize those who don’t look like us, or sug- gest that other people, including immi- grants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as subhuman, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.” Mr. Obama did not mention Mr. Trump or any other leaders by name. The Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020 did not hesitate to do so: Mr. Trump had scarcely finished speaking

from the White House on Monday when his Democratic challengers blamed him explicitly for giving succor to extremists. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president and current Democratic front-runner, accused Mr. Trump on Twitter of having used the presidency “to encourage and embolden white supremacy.” And in an interview with CNN, Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump had “just flat abandoned the theory that we are one people.” Other political leaders reacted with their own raw distress and alarm. Mi- chael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who has bankrolled a crusade for gun control, wrote in a col- umn that the “new atrocities need to change the political dynamic” around guns, and said Mr. Trump’s remarks were little more than “the usual dodge.” And Democratic presidential candidates rounded on Mr. Trump in a front that transcended ideological and tonal divisions in the party. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a populist lib- eral, said Mr. Trump must be held responsible for “amplifying these deadly ideologies,” while Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who has campaigned as

an advocate for racial justice and national healing, derided Mr. Trump’s speech as a “bullshit soup of ineffective words” in a text message that his campaign manager posted on Twitter. An aide to Mr. Booker said he would deliver a major speech on gun violence on Wednesday morning in South Car- olina, at the Emanuel African Methodist

Episcopal Church in Charleston where a white supremacist gunman killed nine people in 2015. And the entwined issues of gun violence and racist extremism began to tumble into elections for offices well beyond the presidency. In Colorado, Mike Johnston, a former state lawmaker and gun-control advocate who is challenging Senator Cory Gardner, a Republican, blamed Mr. Trump for having “created this toxic culture that incites white nationalists.” In 2020, he said, candidates

would have to make a stark binary choice. “Either you’re on the side of the white nationalist holding the AR-15, or you’re on the side of the millions of Americans living in fear of them,” Mr. Johnston said in an interview, referring to a type of as- sault rifle. Mr. Trump, for his part, said he was open to “bipartisan solutions” that would address gun violence, and blamed “the internet and social media” for spreading what he termed “sinister ideologies.” He was not specific about any next steps his administration would take, though he stressed his strong sup- port for the death penalty and seemed to express skepticism that gun restrictions would be an appropriate remedy. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump’s campaign responded to criticism of the president with a statement deploring Democrats for “politi- cizing a moment of national grief.” “The president clearly condemned racism, bigotry and white supremacy as he has repeatedly,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. “He also called for concrete steps to pre-

vent such violent attacks in the future.” Mr. Murtaugh added that “no one blamed Bernie Sanders” when one of his supporters attempted to kill a group of Republican lawmakers at a Virginia baseball diamond in 2017. “The respon- sibility for such horrific attacks,” he said, “lies ultimately with the people who carry them out.” If Mr. Trump and his allies are ada- mant that he is blameless in the rise of extremist violence, much of the public believes he has not adequately sepa- rated himself from white supremacists. A survey published in March by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans — 56 percent — said Mr. Trump had done “too little to distance himself from white nationalist groups.” That group included about a quarter of people who identified themselves as Re- publicans or as leaning toward Mr. Trump’s party. It has not only been liberals who have argued that the mass shooting in El Paso, and another one later in Dayton, Ohio, represented a crisis for the country, and a major test for Mr. Trump. The conservative magazine National Re- view published an editorial on Sunday

calling on Americans and their government to take on “a murderous and re- surgent ideology — white supremacy” in much the same way the government has confronted Islamic terrorism. Mr. Trump, the magazine said, “should take the time to condemn these actions repeatedly and unambiguously, in both general and specific terms.” Frank Keating, the former Republi- can governor of Oklahoma, who led his state through the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Ok- lahoma City by domestic terrorists, said in an interview that the moment called for both new restrictions on firearms and a new tone from the White House. He urged Mr. Trump to “carefully choose your words” to avoid instilling fear or inciting anger. “He needs to realize the lethality of his rhetoric,” Mr. Keating said. “The truth is, the president is the sec- ular pope,” he added, “and he needs to be a moral leader as well as a government leader, and to say that this must not oc- cur again — exclamation mark.” It was not clear whether the El Paso shooting had the potential to become a pivot point in national politics, much as the Oklahoma City bombing had in the 1990s. After that attack, which killed 168 people, President Bill Clinton delivered a searing speech against the “loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible” — a de- nunciation widely understood as being aimed at the extreme right. Mr. Clinton’s handling of the attack helped restore voters’ confidence in him as a strong leader after a shaky start to his presidency. While few Republican lawmakers had anything critical to say about Mr. Trump in public after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, the party harbors profound private anxieties about the impact of his conduct on the 2020 elections. During last year’s midterm elections, Mr. Trump campaigned insistently on a slashing message about illegal immigration, and was rewarded with a sweeping rejection of his party across the country’s diverse cities and prosper- ous suburbs. Punctuating the final weeks of the 2018 elections were a pair of traumatic events that may have deepened voters’ feelings of dismay about the president’s violent language and appeals to racism: a failed wave of attempted bombings by a Trump supporter aimed at the president’s critics, and a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, carried out by a gunman who had railed about immigrant “invaders.” Mr. Trump responded to the Pitts- burgh massacre in a tone similar to the one he used on Monday, lamenting the “terrible, terrible thing, what’s going on with hate in our country,” before taking up his caustic message again on the campaign trail. He paid no price for that approach with his largely rural and white political base, which has re- mained fiercely supportive of his administration through all manner of adversi- ty, error and scandal.

El Paso massacre puts president on defense

NEWS ANALYSIS

Trump’s own rhetoric echoed in Texas gunman’s anti-immigrant manifesto

BY ALEXANDER BURNS

A memorial in El Paso for the 22 people killed in a mass shooting. President Trump has blamed “the internet and social media” for spreading what he termed “sinister ideologies.”

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

In a statement, President Trump condemned “white supremacy” but declined to address his own past language.

Law enforcement officials in the United States have sounded the alarm for months: Homegrown terrorism, including by white supremacists, is now as big a threat as terrorism from abroad. But the mass shooting in El Paso on Satur- day, the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern his- tory, has made it glaringly clear how poorly prepared the country is to fight it. The United States has spent nearly 20 years intensely focused on threats from Islamic extremists. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, rerouted the ma- chinery of government to fight against threats of violence from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But those attacks have waned in recent years, replaced by violence from white supremacists — an increasingly internet-driven phenomenon of lone actors, not groups, that will prove immensely difficult to combat. On Monday, President Trump pledged to give the federal law enforcement authorities “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism. The mo- tive for the second attack of the week- end, in Dayton, Ohio, remains unknown. But even before the two shootings, which left at least 31 people dead, officials said that preventing attacks from white supremacists and nationalists would require adopting the same type of broad and aggressive approach used to battle international extremism. “We need to catch them and incarcer- ate them before they act on their plans,” Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy at- torney general, said in an email interview. “We need to be proactive by identi- fying and disrupting potential terrorists before they strike, and we can accom- plish that by monitoring terrorist propa- ganda and communications.” Under current federal law, that is difficult. Federal officials have broad powers to disrupt foreign terrorist plots, given to them as part of the Patriot Act passed after the 2001 attacks. They can take preventive action, for example, by wire-

tapping or using an undercover online persona to talk to people anonymously in chat rooms to search for jihadists. But domestically, federal officials have far fewer options. A federal statute defines domestic terrorism but carries no penalties. The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, makes stopping terrorist acts commit- ted by Americans before they happen more challenging. No government agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organizations. And individuals who are considered domestic terrorists are charged under laws governing hate crimes, guns and con- spiracy, not terrorism. “It’s a big blank spot,” said Mary Mc- Cord, a former top national security prosecutor who has drafted a proposed statute to criminalize domestic terrorism not covered by existing laws. This would include criminalizing the stock- piling of weapons intended to be used in a domestic terrorist attack. The issue is urgent. Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, the year of Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the Okla- homa City federal building, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And the attack in El Paso and an April shooting in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., alone have claimed as many lives as all extremist homicides “of any stripe” in 2018, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The F.B.I. field office in Phoenix re- cently issued a report that said conspir- acy theories — often with racial over- tones and fueled by dissemination online — had become a growing national security threat. Mr. Rosenstein said that law enforcement needs to model its domestic terrorism response after the international counterterrorism efforts undertaken after the 9/11 attacks. “In the same way that honorable members of mosques report people who express violent de- signs, so, too, should people report violent white nationalists to the police,” he said. The First Amendment’s protection of citizens’ rights to engage in hateful speech makes it difficult to track down attacks before they happen. “From the

perspective of the courts, white supremacy is a hateful but protected form of speech,” said Jonathan Turley, a consti- tutional law expert at George Washing- ton University in Washington. “What courts resist are efforts to classify whole movements as violent as a result of the actions of some of its members.” The problem touches every aspect of American life — politics, civil liberties and business — and involves compli- cated new questions around the issue of technology. How much will technology and communications companies, including the big social media platforms, be willing to share information about domestic customers with law enforcement agencies? On the internet, white nationalists can align with other radicals, become inspired and find the resources they need to act alone — a process that has also helped foreign extremists become terrorists. Perhaps most important, a new focus on white supremacist violence would test whether Americans are as accept- ing of aggressive law enforcement tac- tics when the targets aren’t Muslims, but white Americans. “If they did the same thing that they did with the Muslims, they’d say every white guy is a potential terrorist,” said

Martin R. Stolar, a New York civil rights lawyer. “You can’t do that with white people. The blowback would be out- rageous.” The rise in the white supremacist threat has paralleled an increasing ra- cialization and divisiveness in the nation’s immigration debate. Mr. Trump has used ethnonationalist language that his opponents argue is arousing political

extremists. Even in past years, some political leaders have been slow to recog- nize the existence of domestic terrorism: After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newt Gingrich, at the time the speaker of the House, refused to hold hearings on white nationalist terrorism. In the years since, the nature of white supremacism has changed. It used to be that white supremacists, for the most part, operated in groups, often living in the same area, said Brian H. Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The chapters had some

control over the timing and choice of targets. He cited as examples Aryan Na- tions, the Ku Klux Klan and local Nazi skinhead groups. “The top-down hierarchies of the past have been increasingly supplanted by a more democratized and a geographi- cally dispersed set of erratic do-it-your- selfers,” he said. “Now, so-called lone wolves are turbocharged by a frag- mented and hate-filled dark web which has become a modern-day, virtual neo- Nazi boot camp available 24/7 any- where in the world with an internet con- nection.” Examples of these kinds of actors are the attackers in the Poway synagogue shooting, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall and now, according to the authorities, El Paso. While these men often act alone, the F.B.I. says that technology has allowed American terrorists to plug into a global community of terrorists who espouse similarly hateful ideologies. Domestic terrorists are increasingly citing terrorists overseas in their killings. In his manifesto, the suspected El Paso gunman said that he agreed with the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The sus- pect in New Zealand said in the manifesto he is believed to have written that he had been inspired by Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at the Eman- uel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent and the author of “Anatomy of Terror,” said he had been struck by how much white supremacists resemble the jihadists he spent so many years fight- ing. “There is a striking resemblance be- tween jihadists and white supremacists, and it goes way beyond just utilizing social media in order to spread ideology,” he said. Both use violence to reshape society in their own image. Both use recruit- ment videos that emphasize a lifestyle of “purity,” militancy and physical fit- ness. Jihadists share beheading videos, while right-wing extremists share the live stream of the attack in New Zea- land. He said Ukraine was now a global gathering place for white supremacists, much as Afghanistan was for jihadists in the 1980s. “This is becoming a global

network in so many different ways, just like we’ve seen with the jihadis before them,” he said. Federal investigators have also found white supremacist elements flourishing in prisons. In March, federal prosecu- tors in Alaska announced that an inves- tigation had resulted in charges against 18 members and associates of a white supremacist gang known as the 1488s. In May, a federal grand jury indicted members of an Aryan Knights prison gang that had operated in Idaho. The indictment in the Alaska case de- scribed the 1488s as a gang with dozens of members operating in Alaska and elsewhere. David Neiwert, who has long reported on extremism in the Northwest and has worked with the Southern Pov- erty Law Center, said he sees the threat of the Northwest’s racist groups return- ing to levels of the 1980s, when neo-Nazi elements around the country had moved into the Northwest in a bid to cre- ate a white ethnostate. In the 1990s and 2000s, those groups lost much of their power and subsided. Mr. Neiwert said people with extremist sympathies were now organizing online and attaching themselves to groups that aren’t as explicit about white supremacist notions. “Local agencies in particular should be better equipped,” Mr. Neiwert said. “On the other hand, the F.B.I. and the Justice De- partment could probably do a better job of equipping local law enforcement.” As the international terrorism threat evolved to include more lone actors, rad- icalized online rather than in terrorist cells abroad, the F.B.I. sought to enlist technology companies in its efforts to combat the threat. But companies have been slow to respond — and have been shielded, in part, by the First Amend- ment. “It’s been a very long few years of get- ting platform companies to understand the role that digital media plays in spreading hate speech, harassment and incitement to violence,” said Joan Dono- van, director of the Technology and So- cial Change project at the Harvard Ken- nedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

WASHINGTON

BY SABRINA TAVERNISE, KATIE BENNER, MATT APUZZO AND NICOLE PERLROTH

Reporting was contributed by Serge F. Kovaleski, Audra Burch, William K. Rashbaum and Mike Baker.

Guarding the mall in El Paso near where a gunman killed 22 people. Attacks from Islamic extremists have waned in recent years, replaced by violence from white supremacists.

ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“From the perspective of the courts, white supremacy is a hateful but protected form of speech.”

Fight turns to domestic terror without a clear path to follow

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The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

El Paso massacre puts president on defense

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