THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 N AA DECADE AGO, Daryl Johnson, then a sen-
ior terrorism analyst at the Department of
Homeland Security, wrote a report about
the growing danger of right-wing extrem-
ism in America. Citing economic disloca-
tion, the election of the first African-Amer-
ican president and fury about immigra-
tion, he concluded that “the threat posed
by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is
more pronounced than in past years.”
When the report leaked, conservative
political figures sputtered with outrage,
indignant that their ideology was being
linked to terrorism. The report warned,
correctly, that right-wing radicals would
try to recruit disgruntled military veter-
ans, which conservatives saw as a slur on
the troops. Homeland Security, cowed,
withdrew the document. In May 2009,
Johnson’s unit, the domestic terrorism
team, was disbanded, and he left govern-
ment the following year.
Johnson was prescient, though only up
to a point. He expected right-wing mili-
tancy to escalate throughout Barack Oba-
ma’s administration, but to subside if a Re-
publican followed him. Ordinarily, the far-
right turns to terrorism when it feels pow-
erless; the Oklahoma City bombing hap-
pened during Bill Clinton’s presidency,
and all assassinations of abortion
providers in the United States have taken
place during Democratic administrations.
During Republican presidencies, para-
noid right-wing demagogy tends to re-
cede, and with it, right-wing violence.
But that pattern doesn’t hold when the
president himself is a paranoid right-wing
demagogue.
“The fact that they’re still operating at a
high level during a Republican adminis-
tration goes against all the trending I’ve
seen in 40 years,” Johnson told me. Donald
Trump has kept the far right excited and
agitated. “He is basically the fuel that’s
been poured onto a fire,” said Johnson.
This past weekend, that fire appeared
to rage out of control, when a young man
slaughtered shoppers at a Walmart in El
Paso. A manifesto he reportedly wrote
echoed Trump’s language about an immi-
grant “invasion” and Democratic support
for “open borders.” It even included the
words “send them back.” He told investi-
gators he wanted to kill as many Mexicans
as he could.
Surrendering to political necessity,
Trump gave a brief speech on Monday de-
crying white supremacist terror: “In one
voice, our nation must condemn racism,
bigotry and white supremacy.” He read
these words robotically from a
teleprompter, much as he did after the rac-
ist riot in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017,
when, under pressure, he said, “Racism is
evil — and those who cause violence in its
name are criminals and thugs.”
Back then, it took about a day for the
awkward mask of minimal decency to
drop; soon, he was ranting about the
“very fine people” among the neo-Nazis.
Still, on Monday some pretended that
Trump’s words marked a turning point.
“He really did set a different tone than he
did in the past when it comes to condemn-
ing this hate,” said Weijia Jiang, White
House correspondent for CBS News.
If history is any guide, it won’t be long
before the president returns to tweeting
racist invective and encouraging jingoist
hatreds at his rallies. In the meantime, ev-
eryone should be clear that what Trump
said on Monday wasn’t nearly enough. He
has stoked right-wing violence and his ad-
ministration has actively opposed efforts
to fight it. One desultory speech does not
erase Trump’s politics of arson, or the
complicity of the Republicans who contin-
ue to enable it.
It’s true that the Obama White House,
giving in to Republican intimidation, did-
n’t do enough to combat violent white su-
premacy. But Trump rolled back even his
predecessor’s modest efforts, while bring-
ing the language of white nationalism into
mainstream politics. His administration
canceled Obama-era grants to groups
working to counter racist extremism.
Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor
who oversaw terrorism cases, told The
Washington Post that the agency hasn’t
been as aggressive as it might be against
the racist right because of political con-
cerns. “There’s some reluctance among
agents to bring forth an investigation that
targets what the president perceives as
his base,” he said. “It’s a no-win situation
for the F.B.I. agent or supervisor.”
On Monday, by coincidence, Cesar
Sayoc Jr., the man who sent package
bombs to Democrats and journalists he
viewed as hostile to Trump, was sen-
tenced to 20 years in prison. In a court fil-
ing, his defense lawyers describe how he
was radicalized. “He truly believed wild
conspiracy theories he read on the inter-
net, many of which vilified Democrats and
spread rumors that Trump supporters
were in danger because of them,” they
wrote. “He heard it from the president of
the United States, a man with whom he
felt he had a deep personal connection.”
He became a terrorist as a result of taking
the president both seriously and literally.
Trump probably couldn’t bottle up the
hideous forces he’s helped unleash even if
he wanted to, and there’s little sign he
wants to. If the president never did or said
another racist thing, said Johnson, “it’s
still going to take years for the momentum
of these movements to slow and to die
down.” As it is, Trump’s grudging anti-rac-
ism is unlikely to last the week. The mem-
ory of the mayhem he’s inspired should
last longer. 0
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Trump
Inspires
Terrorism
Don’t pretend the
president’s teleprompter
speech changes anything.
MANY OF TODAY’Smass murderers write
manifestoes. They are not killing only be-
cause they’ve been psychologically dam-
aged by trauma. They’re not killing only
because they are pathetically lonely and
deeply pessimistic about their own lives.
They are inspired to kill by a shared ideol-
ogy, an ideology that they hope to spread
through a wave of terror.
The clearest expression of that ideology
was written by the man charged with a
killing spree in Christchurch, New Zea-
land. His manifesto has been cited by
other terrorists; the suspect in this week-
end’s El Paso mass shooting cited it in his
own manifesto.
It’s not entirely what you’d expect. At
one point its author writes about his trav-
els around the world: “Everywhere I trav-
elled, barring a few small exceptions, I
was treated wonderfully, often as a guest
and even as a friend. The varied cultures
of the world greeted me with warmth and
compassion, and I very much enjoyed
nearly every moment I spent with them.”
The ideology he goes on to champion is
highly racial, but it’s not classic xenopho-
bia or white supremacy. It’s first feature is
essentialism. The most important thing
you can know about a person is his or her
race. A white sees the world as a white and
a Latino sees it as a Latino. Identity is ra-
cial.
The second feature is separatism.
Races are healthy when they are pure and
undiluted. The world is healthy when peo-
ple of different races live apart. The world
is diseased when races mix. “I am against
race mixing because it destroys genetic
diversity and creates identity problems,”
the El Paso suspect wrote.
The third feature is racial Darwinism.
Races are locked in a Darwinian struggle
in which they try to out-reproduce their ri-vals. Currently, the black and brown races
are stronger than the white race and are
on the verge of obliterating it through in-
vasion.
Immigrants, the Christchurch suspect
wrote, come “from a culture with higher
fertility rates, higher social trust and
strong robust traditions that seek to occu-
py my peoples lands and ethnically re-
place my own people.”
If we allow them into our country,
brown immigrants will overwhelm whites
just as Europeans overwhelmed the Na-
tive Americans centuries ago. As the El
Paso suspect put it, “The natives didn’t
take the invasion of Europeans seriously,
and now what’s left is just a shadow of
what was.” Immigration is white replace-
ment. Immigration is white genocide.
This is not an ideology that rises out of
white self-confidence but rather white in-
security.
This ideology is an extreme form of a
broader movement — antipluralism —
that now comes in many shapes.
Trumpian nationalists, authoritarian pop-
ulists and Islamic jihadists are different
versions of antipluralism.
These movements are reactions
against the diversity, fluidity and interde-
pendent nature of modern life. Antiplural-
ists yearn for a return to clear borders,
settled truths and stable identities. They
kill for a fantasy, a world that shines in
their imaginations but never existed in
real life.
The struggle between pluralism and an-
tipluralism is one of the great death strug-
gles of our time, and it is being fought on
every front.
We pluralists do not believe that human
beings can be reduced to a single racial la-
bel. Each person is a symphony of identi-
ties. Our lives are rich because each of us
contains multitudes.
Pluralists believe in integration, not
separation. We treasure precisely the in-
tegration that sends the antipluralists into
panic fits. A half century ago, few mar-
riages crossed a color line. Now, 17 percent
of American marriages are interracial.
Pluralists are always expanding the
definition of “us,” not constricting it.
Eighty years ago, Protestants, Catholics
and Jews did not get along, so a new cate-
gory was created, Judeo-Christian, which
brought formerly feuding people into a
new “us.” Thirty years ago, rivalries were
developing between blacks and Hispan-
ics, and so the category “people of color”
was used to create a wider “us.”
Pluralists believe that culture mixing
has always been and should be the human
condition. All cultures define and renew
themselves through encounter. A pure cul-
ture is a dead culture while an amalgam
culture is a creative culture. The very civi-
lization the white separatists seek to pre-
serve was itself a product of earlier immi-
gration waves.
Finally, pluralism is the adventure of
life. Pluralism is not just having diverse
people coexist in one place. It’s going out
and getting into each other’s lives. It’s a
constant dialogue that has no end because
there is no single answer to how we should
live.
Life in a pluralistic society is an ever-
moving spiral. There are the enemies of
pluralism ripping it apart and the weavers
of community binding it together. There is
no resting spot. It’s change, fluidity and
movement all the way down.
The terrorists dream of a pure, static
world. But the only thing that’s static is
death, which is why they are so patholog-
ically drawn to death. Pluralism is about
movement, interdependence and life. The
struggle ahead is about competing values
as much as it is about controlling guns and
healing damaged psyches. Pluralism
thrives when we name what the terrorists
hate about us, and live it out. 0DAVID BROOKSThe Ideology
Of Hate and
How to Fight It
The battle for the
soul of our culture.
L
AST month, a Nebraska midwife, An-
gela Hock, was charged with neg-
ligent child abuse when a new-
born died after complications
from a breech birth at home. Before this
delivery, Ms. Hock, the proprietor of a
business called Nebraska Birth Keeper,
had performed 50 births at home without
incident, but she was not certified to prac-
tice as a midwife.
It’s unfortunate that these are the
stories about home birth that make head-
lines, because they give the practice a bad
name, and they contribute to a sense that
home births are irresponsible, a danger to
the mother and baby. Home births can be
safe — as long as they occur within a sys-
tem of standards and regulations of the
very sort that were missing in Nebraska.
When home birth is practiced in the shad-
ows because of fear of recrimination, pa-
tients are worse off. We can change this by
acknowledging that home birth is a rea-
sonable medical choice, and by licensing
midwives for home birth in all 50 states.
I have practiced as an obstetrician in
Washington State since 2006. I attend
births only in the hospital, but I frequently
take care of patients who intended to give
birth at home and ended up transferring
to me when their labor didn’t progress
normally. The American College of Obste-
tricians and Gynecologists, or A.C.O.G.,
had long opposed home birth, but in 2017 it
issued a committee opinion acknowledg-
ing that while “hospitals and accredited
birth centers are the safest settings for
birth, each woman has the right to make a
medically informed decision about deliv-
ery.” By contrast, the Royal College of Ob-
stetricians and Gynaecologists in Britain
encourages home birth for women with
uncomplicated pregnancies.
The source of this discrepancy, as well
as a great deal of controversy, is that stud-
ies on newborn outcomes have come to
conflicting conclusions. Data collected by
researchers in California and Oregon sug-gest there may be an increased risk of
death in babies born at home, while re-
search in the Netherlands found no signif-
icant difference between the risks associ-
ated with planned home births and those
associated with planned hospital births.
There is no high-quality data from ran-
domized controlled trials because none
have been conducted.
What does seem clear, however, is that
women undergo fewer interventions
when delivering at home. A meta-analysis
of more than 24,000 births in multiple
countries found lower rates of severe lac-
eration, episiotomy and cesarean section
with planned home births than with
planned hospital births. Maternal out-
comes are very likely better at home be-
cause the possibility of unnecessary inter-
ventions is removed, although those inter-
ventions can still be obtained efficiently
through transfer to a hospital.
There is also evidence from Britain that
there are fewer maternal complications,
like postpartum hemorrhage, when wom-en give birth at home. Cochrane, a trusted
global network of health researchers, dis-
tilled these factors to what is most impor-
tant: The overall safety of home birth is
comparable to that of hospital birth for
healthy patients assisted by experienced
midwives.
Unfortunately, giving birth at a hospital
isn’t universally safe. The United States is
the only developed nation with an increas-
ing rate of maternal death, which has
more than doubled from 1987 to 2015. Ac-
cording to the Institute for Health Metrics
and Evaluation, it is now nearly twice as
dangerous to give birth here as it is in Brit-
ain, France or Germany. Statistics are
even more dire among minorities, with
black women being three to four times aslikely to die as white women.
No one is immune from this risk. In 2017,
Serena Williams almost died of a pulmo-
nary embolism after delivering her
daughter when her complaints of short-
ness of breath weren’t taken seriously at a
Florida hospital. Researchers in Alabama
and Georgia found that half of maternal
deaths are caused by medically prevent-
able complications like embolism, while
the other half, including those linked to
rising obesity rates and poor access to
health care, cannot be blamed entirely on
hospitals.
Marginalizing home birth only endan-
gers patients. There is a better way to han-
dle this, starting with formal accred-
itation. According to the A.C.O.G., approx-
imately 35,000 births occur at home in the
United States each year. State govern-
ments regulate the education and experi-
ence needed to qualify as a birth profes-
sional through licensing. Certified Profes-
sional Midwives are the only providers re-
quired to have training in home birth, but
just 33 states license C.P.M.s to practice.
Nebraska is not one of those states —
only Certified Nurse Midwives who also
hold a nursing degree are licensed, and
they are prohibited from attending births
at home. This means that there are no
birth professionals in Nebraska who are
“properly certified” for home birth, mak-
ing it difficult for patients who want a
home birth to figure out who is qualified
and how to gain access to services.
A recent study published in the scientif-
ic journal PLOS One showed that in states
where midwives are regulated and inte-
grated into the health care system, rates
of neonatal mortality, cesarean section
and preterm birth are all lower, regardless
of birth setting.
The women of America deserve access
to the best medical care possible. They de-
serve access to safe home birth, with a li-
censed midwife, in all states. 0A mother holds her son immediately after giving birth at home in Brooklyn.ALICE PROUJANSKYMake Home Births Safer
Kate McLeanKATE McLEANis a obstetrician-gynecolo-
gist at the University of Washington in
Seattle.We need standards and
regulations for women
who deliver at home.
T
HE man who fatally shot nearly
two dozen people at an El Paso
Walmart on Saturday, an alleged
right-wing extremist, and the
man who shot and killed nine people only
hours later in a downtown area of Day-
ton, Ohio, both unleashed their savage
attacks thanks to military-style rifles.
Just as culpable for the carnage, howev-
er, were the large-capacity magazines
that enabled these shooters to discharge
many rounds of ammunition without re-
loading.
Once all the rounds in a magazine are
fired, reloading takes time. That chunk of
time is often the crucial moment in which
citizens are able to flee (or fight) and law
enforcement is able to arrive and gain
some control of the situation. When
shooters can fire off dozens of shots be-
fore reloading, the potential for mass
casualties heightens.
The lethality of military-style rifles is
self-evident: Six of the deadliest mass
shootings in the last 10 years included
military-style firearms. But large-capac-
ity magazines — generally defined as
ammunition-feeding devices holding
more than 10 rounds — are arguably
even more dangerous than the guns
themselves: A study found roughly half
of recent mass shootings involved them.
A growing consensus among criminolo-
gists is that the critical factor that multi-
plies the mayhem is not necessarily the
style of the weapon but the size of the
magazines.
The tragic use of large-capacity maga-
zines isn’t limited to mass shooters, who
for all their destruction are still responsi-
ble for only about 1 percent of all gun
killings in a given year. The criminologist
Christopher S. Koper — who researched
the impact of the 1990s federal assault
weapons ban, a law that also limited
magazines to 10 rounds — published a
paper last summer showing that since
the federal ban lapsed in 2004, gun
crimes committed with large-capacitymagazines have increased steadily —
over 40 percent in cases of serious vio-
lence. Mr. Koper and his co-authors also
reported, “Trend analyses also indicate
that high-capacity semiautomatics have
grown from 33 to 112 percent as a share of
crime guns since the expiration of the
federal ban — a trend that has coincided
with recent growth in shootings nation-
wide.”
Nevertheless, even with this blood-
shed directly attributable to enlarged
magazines, the gun industry remains
poised to release a new generation of
them that are lighter, more reliable and
higher capacity. Until now, some of the
most common large magazines held 30
rounds of ammunition. This newer gen-
eration, with better anti-friction “self-lu-bricating” technology, ranges from 40 to
100 rounds, and, according to a former of-
ficial of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives, civilian sales
are “going through the roof.”
Only nine states and the District of Co-
lumbia rigorously regulate the capacity
of magazines — limiting them to 10
rounds, except for Colorado, which sets
the limit at 15. While efforts to restore a
federal ban have failed, laws like the one
in New York offer a relatively direct
state-level remedy: Weapons like as-
sault rifles must have fixed, nonremov-
able magazines, and they cannot hold
more than 10 rounds. Yet thanks to
overly generous readings of the Second
Amendment, even common-sense solu-
tions like New York’s law could be con-
sidered unconstitutional.
In March, a Federal District Court
judge struck down the 10-round magazine
limit long established in California law.
The ruling in the case — Duncan v. Be-cerra—is startling for two reasons: first,
magazine capacity limits had been consis-
tently upheld in court; second, the judge
concluded there is a Second Amendment
right to own bullet magazines holding
more than 10 rounds, calling it a core right
of the amendment. The judge’s suspect,
downright strange ruling is on appeal to
the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
where it may be overturned.
Even if it is, we still live in a precarious
moment in this Trump era, in which a seat
on the federal bench demands a prerequi-
site fealty to an expansive reading of per-
sonal gun rights under the Second
Amendment.
In addition, the Supreme Court’s deci-
sion to accept an appeal to a lower court
ruling upholding a New York City gun law
suggests the justices may be looking to re-
visit, and perhaps expand, gun rights.
Leading the way is Justice Clarence
Thomas, who in 2018 voiced his dismay
with the courts’ interpretation of gun
rights, saying the Second Amendment has
been treated “cavalierly,” as a “disfavored
right” and a “constitutional orphan.”
But the constitutional regulation of am-
munition-feeding devices in this country
dates back nearly a century. From 1927 to
1934, 16 states enacted laws that restricted
magazine capacity. Among the states that
listed maximum capacity, they ranged
from more than one round to a maximum
of 18. And this was during the gun crime
wave of the 1920s and early 1930s — when
the weaponry we have now was the stuff
of science fiction.
What greater purpose is there for large-
capacity magazines today?
For now, the United States is not going
to seriously restrict the sale of military-
style weapons. But we can at least restrict
the tragic capabilities of their firepower.
Judges shouldn’t stand in the way. The
Constitution certainly doesn’t. 0Large-capacity magazines
may be more dangerous
than the guns themselves.
ROBERT J. SPITZERis the chair of the politi-
cal science department at SUNY Cort-
land and the author of five books on gun
policy, including “The Politics of Gun
Control.”Unlimited Ammo Isn’t a Right
Robert J. Spitzer