MONDAY, AUGUST 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
tacks come from street mobs or
individuals, historians said. Such
acts also can be encouraged by
anti-immigrant rhetoric from po-
litical leaders, though there’s not
always a direct relationship be-
tween the two.
For example, Calvin Coolidge
was vice president in 1921 — he
would become president two
years later — when he said that
“Biological laws tell us that cer-
tain divergent people will not mix
or blend.” At that point, anti-im-
migrant sentiment and violence
had already been prevalent for
several years.
Anti-immigrant violence is of-
ten motivated by a sense of crisis,
Berger said in an email exchange,
which “ can come from many quar-
ters, including extremist propa-
ganda, other kinds of propa-
ganda, media coverage and the
utterances of politicians...
Themes like ‘the great replace-
ment’ (whether the extremists ac-
tually read the book) help unify
these disparate influences under
a single conceptual u mbrella.”
The New Zealand shooter
wrote in his manifesto that immi-
gration “is ethnic replacement.
This is cultural replacement. This
is racial replacement. This is
WHITE GENOCIDE.”
In El Paso, the manifesto railed
against a “Hispanic invasion.”
When it was posted, its author
urged his audience on 8chan to
“do your part and spread this
brothers!”
In a growing number of shoot-
ings, online manifestos have
emerged as a way for extremists
simultaneously to reach for atten-
tion and to spread their ideology.
The technology is new, but the
basic approach has been around
for centuries.
From its earliest days in the
1920s, Germany’s Nazi party, then
a small collection of extremists
staging attacks in the streets of
Munich, used the party newspa-
per to enhance the impact of each
violent assault on the city’s Jews
and elected officials.
And American neo-Nazis in the
last decades of the 20th century
relied heavily on the influence o f a
novel by extremist William Pierce,
“The Turner Diaries,” t o motivate
a wave of white supremacist ter-
rorist attacks, including Timothy
McVeigh’s bombing of a federal
building in Oklahoma City in
1995; the attack killed 1 68 people.
“Extremism generally thrives
in situations where people are
experiencing uncertainty about
their i dentities,” Berger said. “A nd
the political environment right
now is very conducive to this.”
[email protected]James McAuley in Paris contributed to
this report.1891 after they were acquitted on
charges of killing the city’s police
chief. Then-congressman Henry
Cabot Lodge (R), later a senator
from Massachusetts, said that
“such acts as the k illing of these 1 1
Italians do not spring from noth-
ing without reason or provoca-
tion.” Rather, he said, such vio-
lence stems from “the utter care-
lessness with which we treat im-
migration in this c ountry.”
In 1924, when Congress debat-
ed tight new restrictions on immi-
gration, especially from eastern
and southern Europe, even politi-
cians who fought to keep the bor-
ders open were dismissive of ac-
cepting newcomers from other
parts of the world. Rep. Fiorello
LaGuardia, a half-Italian, half-
Jewish representative of one of
the country’s most ethnically di-
verse districts and later New York
mayor, opposed the restrictions,
but said the country should ex-
clude Asians because they do not
assimilate into American c ulture.
“It is inherent to the species
that everybody has to have some-
body to look down on and to fear,”
Okrent said.
Violence against newcomers
tends to surge in periods of eco-
nomic distress and rapid change,
and that’s true whether the at-“It is obviously not ‘The Great
Replacement,’ the book, which
ca uses the mass massacres,” Ca-
mus wrote on Twitter. “It is the
great replacement itself.”
But replacement theory d id not
originate with Camus. Waves of
anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, an-
ti-Catholic and anti-black vio-
lence have rolled periodically
across America since the early
19th century, reflecting the fear
that the livelihoods and commu-
nities of those already here were
under attack by those just arriv-
ing.
“In almost every generation,
there’s a generalized fear or anxi-
ety in which the most recent im-
migrants are seen as taking the
jobs of people who’ve been here a
longer time,” O krent said.
In the 1840s, Protestant rioters
in Philadelphia attacked Irish
Catholics. In t he 1850s, Protestant
lynch mobs in Louisville targeted
German and Italian Catholics. In
1871, whites massacred Chinese
immigrants. And in each genera-
tion, leading politicians adopted
some of the anti-other rhetoric of
the mobs, even if they rejected the
violence i tself.
Okrent offered the example of
the New Orleans mob that
lynched 11 Italian immigrants inknowing them offline, and social
media provides a vector for vio-
lent contagion to spread. The seri-
al manifestos we’ve seen over the
last couple of years serve as a way
to ‘know’ someone who has com-
mitted violence.”
The notion that a “great re-
placement” o f whites by some oth-
er group is being encouraged by
powerful forces is often credited
to a French writer, Renaud Ca-
mus, who wrote a 2012 book called
“The Great Replacement.” Camus
argued that Europe’s white major-
ities a re actively being replaced by
immigrants from North and sub-
Saharan Africa, threatening the
character, safety and success of
European nations.
In 2017, when white suprema-
cist protesters marched through
the University of Virginia campus
in Charlottesville, they chanted
“Jews will not replace us” and
“You will not replace us.” Chatter
about the “ great replacement” t ri-
pled on Twitter between 2014 and
2018, according to a study by a
British research group, the Insti-
tute for Strategic Dialogue.
On Sunday, Camus denied re-
sponsibility for the El Paso shoot-
ing, but endorsed the ideas Cru-
sius may have touted in the mani-
festo.Muslims. In E l Paso, the manifesto
took aim at Hispanic immigrants.
But the underlying belief system
— and much of the rhetoric — was
the same and lifted, sometimes
word for word, from extremist
tracts that circulate widely on
anonymous online message
boards such as 8chan and Reddit.
“Many of the killers are lone-
wolf losers indoctrinated to hate
through the Internet, just like Is-
lamic terrorists,” former deputy
attorney general Rod J. Rosen-
stein wrote on Twitter late Satur-
day. “Killing random civilians to
spread a political message is ter-
rorism. F.B.I. classifies it as do-
mestic terrorism, but ‘white ter-
rorism’ i s more precise.”
Whatever label is attached to
any mass shootings committed b y
anti-immigrant extremists, they
should be viewed not as individu-
al acts but as part of a contagion,
said J.M. Berger, a researcher on
terrorism and propaganda and
author of “Extremism.”
“Social media allows a lot of
people with similar ideological
ideas to synchronize their ac-
tions,” Berger said. “You’re more
likely to commit violence if you
know someone who has commit-
ted violence. Knowing someone
virtually is not that different f romcomers are taking the jobs of
white Christians in the United
States and other Western nations.
The alleged killer of nine peo-
ple in Dayton, Connor B etts, was a
24-year-old Chipotle worker and
community college student driv-
en by personal grievance rather
than political ideology, authori-
ties said. Betts, who was killed by
police, shot his own sister among
his victims.
Showing up outside a popular
bar around 1 a.m. wearing body
armor and carrying a high-
capacity rifle and extra maga-
zines, the Dayton shooter instant-
ly joined the ranks of gunmen who
have learned online, in video
games and in countless movies
and TV shows how to escalate
personal beefs into community-
shattering events.
In C hicago, 40 people were shot
— three of them fatally — in week-
end incidents that authorities at-
tributed to forces that are tragical-
ly quotidian in some of the na-
tion’s roughest neighborhoods.
The shootings revived a long-
standing debate over whether
such violence might still be hap-
pening if the country had resolved
its seemingly eternal battles
about guns and economic in-
equality.
The weekend’s violence rekin-
dled an array of other national
arguments: over gun rights, over
pop culture, over social m edia and
over what constitutes terrorism.
Amid the overwhelming tragedy
of the shootings, the El Paso inci-
dent drew special attention to the
problem of lone-wolf shooters
and whether they should be
viewed as isolated actors — “sick
people,” in the words of White
House chief of staff Mick Mulva-
ney — or as part of a larger, ideo-
logically driven m ovement.
“These are not single shooters,”
said Daniel Okrent, author of
“The Guarded Gate,” a history of
anti-immigrant bigotry in the
United States. “They’re a mob
with high-powered rifles, people
who feel they’re part of something
bigger. The technology has
changed: A mob doesn’t have to
get together in the street with
torches anymore.”
The manifesto, which authori-
ties are trying to ascertain wheth-
er it is indeed linked to Crusius,
said the violence was inspired by
the murders o f 51 people in March
at two mosques in Christchurch,
New Zealand, part of a chain of
mass murders linked by the kill-
ers’ fears of an invasion that
threatened white Christian domi-
nance.
At synagogues in Pittsburgh
and Poway, Calif., Jews were the
target. In New Zealand, it was
SHOOTINGS FROM A
Mass shootings in America
Writing manifestos to spread extremism is nothing new
PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POSTPeople leave flowers and dedications outside a Walmart in El Paso, where 2 0 people were shot and killed, and dozens wounded. That shooting and others continue to revive the debate about gun rights.
A man touches a statue following Sunday services at the Santo Niño de Atocha church in El Paso. The suspect in Saturday’s shooting
appears to have posted an online manifesto that reflected an extreme white supremacist ideology known as “the great replacement.”