The Boston Globe - 05.08.2019

A10 Editorial The Boston Globe MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019

A

merica is sick. And it’s getting sicker.

Sick with hate, sick with rage. Sick with warped

masculinity, sick with Internet-fueledradicalization and

social isolation. Sick with racism, sick from social media

that has breathed new life into old prejudices.

And sick, of course,with guns.

In one sense, the two mass shootings this weekend within 24

hours of each other, whichleft 20 dead at a Walmart in El Paso,

Texas, and at least another nine deadnear a bar in Dayton, Ohio,

don’t tell us anything we don’t already know:We’re in the midst of

a national outburst of mass gun violence, overwhelminglyat the

hands of young, whitemen.

Just this year, 125 people have died and scores more wounded

in 22 mass-fatality events in the United States, and yet the political

system remains incapable of delivering any meaningfulsteps to

reduceaccess to assault weapons, ammunition,and other

weapons of war. We needa ban on assault weaponsand high-

capacity magazines, universal background checks, and legislation

to remove the gun industry’s special exemption from liability so it

can be held accountable for the devastation caused by its products.

Yet even a modest effort to tighten background checks for gun-

buyers is stuck in the Republican-controlled Senate.

But recent killings also make it clearthat whilegunsremain a

mortal threat — and the common denominator in every recent US

mass-murder, not to mentioncountlessacts of everyday violence

— the social pathologiesthat Americasomehow needs to solvecut

muchdeeper.

Mass shootings in the United States are also, increasingly, hate

crimes. The shooterin El Paso, for instance, left a 2,300-word,

hate-filledmanifesto aimed at Hispanic immigrants; it is being

investigated as a possible hate crime. The shooter at a Pittsburgh

synagogue last fall spouted anti-Semiticonline rants. The Pulse

nightclubkiller in 2016 targeted gays. The Charleston, S.C.,

shootertargeted blackchurchgoers in 2015. The Isla Vista, Calif.,

killer in 2014 was steepedin online misogyny and targeted

women.

The targets might be different, but the sullen, aggrieved

mentality of the perpetrators is the same. These are men who want

scapegoats for what they perceive as unfairly diminished

socioeconomic status.

In many cases, it appears the killers found affirmation and

encouragement fromthe kind of toxic onlinesubcultures that

didn’t exist two or three decades ago. The Internet didn’t invent

hate, but it has becomea powerful incubator. Algorithmsdesigned

to keep users engaged steer them to ever-darker, angrier cornersof

the web. If you just need somebody to hate, YouTube and

Facebook are more than happy to oblige.

After all, it takes more than just a gun to turn churches,

shopping malls, or schools into battlefields. It takes a belief that

human life is cheap in general, or that people who are different by

virtue of skin color, religion,or identity are subhuman. And, for

many of thesekillers, making that leap appears to take an online

echo chamber to egg them on.

The alleged shooter in El Paso, for instance, approvingly cited

another mass killerin New Zealand; that shooter, in turn,

expressed his support for a Norwegian anti-immigrant murderer.

The connections map a global network of whitesupremacist

ideology, malcontents who have found one anotherthrough

message board like 8chan and mainstream social networks like

Twitter.

Internet radicalization is a well-studied phenomenon— or at

least, it is when it comes to Islamic radicals. But accordingto the

FBI, the biggest terrorist threat to Americans since 9/11 has been

other Americans. ChristopherWray, the agency’s director, says

white supremacist violence is a “pervasive” problem and that the

majority of the agency’s domestic terror arrests since October have

been related to white supremacists. The FBI, and other law

enforcement agencies, needto give whitesupremacist violence the

priority that it clearly deserves.

Yet the most law enforcement can do is mitigate the problem —

by disrupting hate groups whenthey crossthe line into inciting

violence, and by enforcinggun laws when and if Congress finally

strengthens them.

What Americaultimately needs goes well beyond what the FBI

can provide.After all, most of what happens on sites like 8chan

isn’t illegal — and, with the protection of the First Amendment,

never will be. What America needsis a coherentnational strategy

to disrupt hate, to lower the temperature of our polarized political

culture,and to pierce the real or online communities in which

hate grows.

An honest discussion of how to cure these ills would raise

uncomfortablequestions for the nation’s most powerful

corporations and politicians. For SiliconValley, anger is profitable

when it translates into clicks. Gun companies profit when

Americans feel threatened. Politicians, most prominently

President Trump, benefit when hate stays just below the boiling

point — when Americans are just mad enough to vote on the basis

of anger at immigrants, but not quite mad enough to mowdown

Hispanicsat a mall in El Paso.

But the combination of easy accessto guns on the one hand,

and easy access to hateful ideologies offering reasons to use them

on the other, has becomea nightmare.

Sicknesses can be cured. But they can also be fatal. Twenty-nine

moreAmericans died this weekend from hate-fueled gun violence.

How many more have to die before we face up to two problems

that are, increasingly, differentsides of the same bloodycoin?

The real American

carnage

Opinion

BOSTONGLOBE.COM/OPINION

Editorial

A

fter a gunman mur-

dered at least nine

people and

wounded more

than 20 early

Sunday in Day-

ton, Ohio,assistant chief of

policeLt. Col. Matt Carper told

reporters, “Police believe the

suspect acted aloneand that

thereis no remaining threat to

the community.”

With the gunman shot

deadby responding officers,

thoseare supposedto serve as

words of comfort, a sign that

we can now exhale: The threat

is over. We’ll mourn, but we’ll

be OK. The bloodshed, as

Carper said, was “quickly put

to an end.”

Of course, if we understand

anything about this nation we

recognize this is a lie meantto

pacify jostled nerves and

psyches. The threat is never

over. We’ll mourn again, but

we’ll never be OK again. In

America, bloodshed is a world

without end.

So long as thereis an ag-

grieved man with easy access

to guns, and unchecked anger

aboutimmigrants,women,

people of color, the LGBTQ

community, Jews, or his own

failings, therewill always be a

remainingthreat to our com-

munities, cities, towns, and

nation.

From Columbine to Sandy

Hook, from Charleston to Or-

lando, fromLas Vegas to Park-

land,and now from El Paso to

Dayton,this is how we live.

And this, with alarming fre-

quency, is how too many now

die.

Have all the victims from

last weekend’s mass shooting

at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Ca-

lif., been released fromthe

hospital or buried yet? Do we

knowwhat compelled a gun-

man with what Dayton police

described as a “a long gun” to

openfire on peoplevisiting

RENÉE GRAHAM

Two mass

shootings in 24

hours — this is

how we live

ByJenniferC. Braceras

P

rogressives often support

diversity mandates as a

path to equality and a

way to level the proverbi-

al playing field. But all

too often such policies are a disin-

genuous formof virtue-signaling

thatbenefitsonlythemostprivi-

leged and does little to help average

people.

A pair of bills sponsored by Mas-

sachusetts state Senator Jason Lewis

and House Speaker Pro Tempore Pa-

tricia Haddad, to ensure “gender

parity” on boards and commissions,

provide a case in point.

Haddadand Lewis are concerned

that more than half the state-

government boards are less than 40

percent female. Haddad claims legis-

lators have a “strong obligation” to

rectify the situation. Lewis describes

the issue as “critically important.”

In orderto ensure that elite

women have more such

opportunities, the duo have

proposed imposing government

quotas. If the bills become law, state

boards and commissions will be

required to set aside50 percent of

board seats for women by 2022.

(The bill defines “woman” as any

individual “who self-identifies her

gender as a woman,without regard

to the individual’s designated sex at

birth.”)

Not content to impose Soviet-

style quotas on state-appointed

boards, Lewis also wants to subject

the private sector to social

engineering. His second bill would

require publicly held corporations

headquartered in Massachusetts to

have at least one female director by

2022. By 2024, private companies
      with six or more directors would be
      required to have a minimumof

three women on the board. Failure

to complycould result in fines of up

to $100,000.

The proposal is similar to a

measure recently adopted in

California, which last year became

the first state to require gender

quotas for private companies.

In signing the measure,

California Governor Jerry Brown

admitted that the law, which

expressly classifies people on the

basis of sex, is probably

unconstitutional.

The US Supreme Court frowns on

sex-based classifications unless they

are designed to address an “impor-

tant” policy interest (such as privacy

or safety). Because the California law

applies to all boards, even where

there is no history of prior discrimi-

nation, courts are likely to rule that

the law violates the constitutional

guarantee of “equal protection.”

But are such government

mandates even necessary? Female

participation on corporate boards

may not currently mirror the

percentage of women in the general

population, but so what?

The number of women on

corporate boards has beensteadily

increasing without government

meddling. According to a study by

Catalyst, between 2010 and 2015the

share of women on the boards of

global corporations increased by 54

percent. And their numbers are still

growing.

To be sure, women in 2015 still

held only 15 percent of seats on

global corporate boards, but the free

market is clearly pushing companies

in the right direction.

Requiring companies to make

gender the primary qualification for

board membership will inevitably

lead to less qualified private sector

boards. That is exactly what

happened when Norway adopted a

nationwide corporate gender quota.

According to a 2012 paper by USC

professor Kenneth R. Ahern and

University of Michigan professor

Amy K. Dittmar, Norway’s gender

quota “led to younger and less

experienced boards... and

deterioration in operating

performance, consistent with less

capable boards.”

Advocates of state-mandated

quotas may believe that less-experi-

enced boards are a necessary price to

pay to change corporate culture and

increase leadership opportunities for

women. But gender quotas do noth-

ing of the sort.

Norway is once again instructive,

since that country’s gender quotas

have not had significant effect on

corporate culture or led to the

promotion of more women

throughout the ranks. In fact, the

only thing Norway’s gender quotas

have done is benefit the individual

women actually selected to serve on

the corporate boards.

Writing in The New Republic,

Alice Lee notes that increasing the

number of opportunities for board

membership without increasing the

pool of qualified women to serve on

such boards has led to a “golden

skirt” phenomenon, where the same

elite women scoop up multiple seats

on a variety of boards.

Next time somebody pushes

corporate quotas as a way to

promote gender equity, remember

that such policies (even if

constitutional) are largely self-

serving measures that make their

sponsors feel good but do little to

help average women.

Jennifer C. Braceras is director of the

Center for Law & Liberty at

Independent Women’s Forum.

Corporate gender quotas

reinforce privilege

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WhenTrumpspeaksof America,healways

meanswhitepeople.InTe xas,anotherwhite

manwitha gunseeminglyheardhis

president’scall,anddidwhat hethought

necessary to endit.