20 United States The EconomistAugust 10th 2019
2 groups recruited through mainstream
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube, where they comprised a negligi-
ble share of these firms’ revenue and users.
That made it easy for companies and gov-
ernments to kick jihadists off these sites.
White-nationalist extremists use smaller
platforms that have no interest in joining
the mainstream. Sometimes their service
providers step in: Cloudflare, for instance,
withdrew its web-security protections
from 8chan, a web forum popular with the
far right. These sites then pop up else-
where, hosted in an obscure jurisdiction.
Shortly before he began his attack, Pat-
rick Crusius, the El Paso shooter, appears to
have posted a manifesto on 8chan. He
wrote that his attack was “a response to the
Hispanic invasion of Texas”—a state that
until 1836 was part of Mexico. He railed
against immigration and environmental
damage, and advocated “decreas[ing] the
number of people in America using re-
sources. If we can just get rid of enough
people, then our way of life can become
sustainable.” Towards that end, he trav-
elled from the suburb of Dallas where he
was brought up to El Paso, a majority-His-
panic border city, and opened fire in a store
packed with back-to-school shoppers from
Mexico. One survivor said he specifically
targeted people he thought were Hispanic.
“The Hispanic community,” he wrote,
“was not my target until I read The Great
Replacement.” This refers to a conspiracy
theory that blames feckless Western elites
for “replacing” people of European ances-
try with non-white immigrants. “The Great
Replacement” was the title of a book by a
French polemicist. Brenton Tarrant, an
Australian man who earlier this year mur-
dered 51 people in two mosques in New
Zealand, used it as the title of his own man-
ifesto, which Mr Crusius endorsed.
This is an updated version of an older
conspiracy theory known as white geno-
cide, which propounds that the world’s
white population is being deliberatelyshrunk and diluted through mass immi-
gration, low fertility rates, multicultural-
ism and miscegenation (Mr Crusius also
inveighed against “race mixing”). Unsur-
prisingly, many on the far right believe this
to be a Jewish plot.
These beliefs, notes Oren Segal of the
Anti-Defamation League, “are not just on
these fringe internet forums. If anyone op-
erating there turned on Fox News, they
would hear similar sentiments.” Tucker
Carlson, the second-most-popular host on
cable news, has said that Democrats want
“demographic replacement” through “a
flood of illegals”. Laura Ingraham, another
host, has argued that Democrats “want to
replace you, the American voters, with
newly amnestied citizens and an ever-in-
creasing number of chain migrants.”
Prominent politicians have said the
same thing. Steve King, a congressmanfrom Iowa, infamously wrote that “we can’t
restore our civilisation with somebody
else’s babies.” On the House floor Ted Yoho
and Louie Gohmert, both Republican con-
gressmen, have compared immigrants to
invaders. During a trip to Europe in 2018,
Donald Trump said that immigration has
“changed the fabric of Europe”, and told a
British tabloid, “I think you are losing your
culture. Look around.” More recently, his
Facebook campaign ads have warned, “We
have an invasion...It’s criticalthat we
stop the invasion.” Take this literally and
violence becomes a defensive measure.
Correlation is not causation, but fbi
data show a recent uptick in reported hate
crimes. Men who killed Jews in synagogues
in California and Pittsburgh blamed Jews
for immigrant “invaders” and the “geno-
cide of the european race”. Despite the
president’s occasional disavowals, these
people really like him. The Christchurch
shooter called Mr Trump “a symbol of re-
newed white identity and common pur-
pose”. One researcher who attends extrem-
ist rallies (in disguise) reports “unanimous
support for Trump...These folks rallied
around him. They saw large parts of their
messaging getting into the mainstream.”
To his credit, in a speech on August 5th
Mr Trump denounced “racism, bigotry and
white supremacy”. He also advocated mak-
ing it easier to commit the mentally ill to
hospital, “stop[ping] the glorification of vi-
olence in our society” and develop “tools
that can detect mass-shooters before they
strike”. Missing from the list was a commit-
ment to moderate his own speech, or any-
thing that would make it substantially
harder for angry young men to obtain
semi-automatic weapons. 7X and whySources: Mother Jones; press reports*Shootings with three or more fatalities excluding perpetrator(s). Before January 2013,
with four or more fatalities. Not comprehensive †At August 7thUnited States, mass shootings*, 1982-2019
Number of fatalities0204060801001201982 85 90 95 2000 05 10 15 19†21 McDonald’s
restaurant
San Ysidro, CA14 Post office
Edmond, OK23 Luby ’s cafeteria
Killeen, TX13 Columbine
High School
Littleton, CO32 Virginia Tech
Blacksburg , VA12 Movie theatre, Aurora, CO
13 American Civic Association Centre, Binghamton, NY 13 Army
base,
Fort
Hood,
TX27 Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, CT26 First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs, TX22
El Paso,
TX9 Dayton,
OH14 Inland Regional Centre, San Bernardino, CA
12 Navy Yard, Washington, DC49 Pulse nightclub, Orlando, FLIndividual incident 58 Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas, NV
Incident with more than ten fatalities“Oppressive language does more than
represent violence; it is violence; does
more than represent the limits of
knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether
it is obscuring state language or the
faux-language of mindless media;
whether it is the proud but calcified
language of the academy or the
commodity-driven language of science;
whether it is the malign language of
law-without-ethics, or language designed
for the estrangement of minorities, hiding
its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it
must be rejected, altered and exposed.”
Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, as the first
African-American writer to receive the
prize, in 1993. She died on August 5th.On malign words