The man who committed the El Paso murders last week specifically sought out persons of Mexican and Latino heritage for his killings because he had been carefully cultivated by white supremacists on the Internet to do exactly that. This was all pursuant to a conscious, deliberate strategy employed by a white supremacist movement that has now transformed itself into an online cheering section, promoting and inciting others to commit murder, while escaping any legal culpability for doing so.
That is the conclusion of Pete Simi, professor of sociology at Chapman University. Simi has studied extremist groups and their violent tactics for over 20 years. In an interview by Alan Pyke, and as described in Pyke’s article for ThinkProgress, Simi explains how none of these race-motivated mass shootings is ever a case of someone “acting alone.”
These mass murders are the direct byproduct of a practice of obfuscation and disinformation the white supremacist movement has spent decades perfecting. It’s a messaging campaign designed to encourage in-group believers to take violent action, while tricking outside observers into believing the actor was self-inspired and isolated. It is an intentional, robust, and well-developed system with a clear history.
Simi says that the myth of the deranged “lone wolf” attacker is a deliberate fiction promoted by the white supremacist community to disguise its own involvement for instigating these attacks. The cultivation (“radicalization”) of Patrick Crusius, the Trump-supporting 21-year-old responsible for killing 22 people in El Paso, Texas, follows the classic pattern employed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups dating back to the 1980s.
“That’s the strategy: To get individuals or small groups of individuals to commit violence on behalf of the movement, without the violence being connected to the movement,” said Simi, a Chapman University sociology professor. He added that white supremacists view it as “one of the most important strategies” to their success.
Every time a media outlet falls into the trap of characterizing these shooters as isolated individuals or emphasizing that they “acted alone” is another victory for the white supremacist movement because it speaks to the success of this strategy.
The refrain of these racists is always the same—they describe themselves as a ”like-minded community” who are simply engaged in politely exchanging their views online, and then they go their own separate ways. They never meet physically or exchange personal information. When one of them takes the violent rhetoric so exchanged to its natural conclusion, then no one is there to be held culpable. They are aware that their rhetoric will cause violence, even if they don’t actually know whom of their “community” will actually commit it, or when. It is a coordinated effort to achieve "deniability" and the leaders of these groups know exactly what they're doing.
And creating, fomenting violence is the whole point. As Simi notes, it is really simply a matter of waiting: “Violence is central to the ideology. The ideology doesn’t exist without violence, so there has to be violence for the ideology to continue.”
“The key here is this is not just a person who for whatever reason feels like violence is the solution to their problems. This is somebody that identifies a larger set of problems that are connected to an existing social movement, and sees their violence as acting on the larger interests of the movement,” Simi said.
For his article, Pyke also interviewed former white supremacist Tony McAleer, who now heads a group called “Life After Hate,” that seeks to “deprogram” the same “aspiring lone wolves” who now participate in the online white supremacist community and attend its rallies. In the late 1980s, McAleer designed a phone “call-in” system for the dissemination of white supremacy ideology which prefigured the tactics used today on the Internet. And in1994 McAleer actually built one of the first “white power” websites. During all this time, the strategy of creating incitement to violence while at the same time escaping liability was his primary goal.
“Most of the messages were anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic. And I had a pretty good idea where the legal line was. The idea was to go right up to that legal line and go no further,” McAleer said.
As aptly described by Pyke, the strategy of "deniability" was a way of ”weaponizing the media’s fondness for the ‘he acted alone’ trope. But it was just as important from a practical standpoint. Because the victims of white supremacist violence had found ways to connect the legal dots and hold high officers in such groups as the Aryan nation accountable for the actions of their followers. One prominent leader, Richard Butler, had his assets taken away after being successfully sued. After that, the movement knew it had to tread carefully to avoid liability.
Thus, a coherent, intentional and uniform strategy was born. The advent of4-Chan, 8-Chan and similar online “chat rooms” where such violent exhortations take place is the natural outgrowth of that philosophy, the creation of a “community identity” with the added incentive and attraction of absolute anonymity:
Today’s web-based version of all this may look slightly different. But the idea has always been that, sooner or later, the community would spawn a monster committed to the violent fantasies they shared.
Perhaps even more disturbing (and as elaborated in Pyke’s article) the tactics of white supremacist groups are also clearly visible in the behavior of this president and his enablers in the conservative media, as they collaborate to formulate their public response to these shootings.
Simi explains how after the El Paso murders the Trump administration deliberately sent two messages—one for the general public, in which Donald Trump robotically read a half-hearted condemnation of the murders from a teleprompter. And the other, coded message as delivered by his spokesmen in interviews broadcast on Fox News, interviews in which administration officials and their white supremacist allies such as Tucker Carlson and Brian Kilmeade mutually downplayed or ridiculed the relationship between Trump’s own hate-infested speeches and rallies and the El Paso killings. Simi says that this is the same type of “dual messaging” that the white supremacist movement engages in, in order to escape its responsibility for instigating these violent acts.
We’ll likely never know exactly who egged on the El Paso shooter, inducing him to commit these murders. But we can be fairly sure it was a collective, concerted effort, pursuant to a strategy that dates back decades. And thanks in large part to Donald Trump and his white supremacist enablers in the conservative media, it is a strategy that will continue to be employed to incite the next mass shooting, and the next one, and the next.