White domestic terrorism has been ascending the ladder of most lethal threats to society.
By Bruce C.T. Wright
NEWSONE.COM
America went to sleep Saturday night mourning the deaths of at least 20 people in a racist shooting in El Paso only to wake up to the news that at least nine more people were killed in a separate mass public shooting overnight in Dayton, Ohio. Those two shootings came one week after another racist shooting took the lives of at least three people at a popular annual public gathering in Gilroy, California.
The one thing that all three shootings — and the lion’s share of public shootings in this country — had in common was that they were waged by White males who were born in this country, a fact that has increasingly contributed to many labeling the demographic as the single greatest threat to civilization. It was also increasingly apparent that White domestic terrorism has quickly ascended the ladder of most lethal threats to society.
And as the president posts racist tweets nonstop, he was simply deflecting responsibility for his own role in encouraging racist violence waged by domestic White male terrorists, who have apparently infested this country much quicker than any group of urban rodents ever could.
While the identification of the Dayton gunman and motivation for the shooting overnight at a bar there had not been confirmed by officials, the El Paso shooting was reportedly the result of a young White man’s anger over the number of Hispanics in the U.S. That much was made clear in an apparent manifesto written by that shooter, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old White man who wrote that he was decidedly against “race mixing.”
Six days earlier, Santino William Legan killed multiple people attending the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California behind social media posts that show he may have been a White supremacist or at least sympathized with the racist movement. This included one that endorsed the book “Might Is Right,” which has been banned in multiple countries and essentially advocates for social Darwinism, or the idea that members of certain races or ethnicities are inherently better equipped for survival than others. Though the true author of the book is unknown, it first appeared in the 19th century and argued that the “white race” was biologically superior.
In fact, out of the 10 most deadly recent public shootings, all but one of the gunmen was a White male who was born in the United States. Disgruntled employee DeWayne Craddock, who was Black, killed at least 12 people in Virginia Beach in May, making him an anomaly but no less despicable than his White male counterparts. But that shooting did not appear to be politically, let alone racially motivated.
More damning, according to an article posted on vox.com in 2017, statistics have shown that “White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners.”
Since 9/11, some of the most horrific acts of terrorism in the United States have been committed by American citizens. This especially goes for the nation’s police departments that routinely kill unarmed Black people suspected of committing the same crimes White suspects survive — like in El Paso, where Crusius, armed with an assault rifle after killing at least 20 people, was able to be apprehended and arrested without being injured, let alone shot. However, when the attacker is not brown, there is usually some hesitation in calling them a terrorist. From the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting in 2012 to the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, terrorism is alive and well in this country — and the culprits rightfully should be called domestic terrorists.
Of course, terrorism doesn’t have to only result in death. That much was clear in Louisiana when suspected White supremacist Holden Matthews was charged with a hate crime after leaving a trail of damning evidence appearing to connect him to three Black churches that were burned down in March and April. No one died, but the message of hate toward Black worshippers was clear to many.
But typically, the average neo-White male terrorist intends to kill, as the three shootings over the last week along with past incidents of domestic terrorism have more than demonstrated. The same goes for everybody from Dylann Roof to Cesar Sayoc, who sent bombs through the U.S. Postal Service to Black people who included former President Barack Obama and current U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters.
And while Washington sits on its hands, only offering thoughts and prayers instead of taking restrictive legislative action, chances are more than likely that the same carnage from White domestic terrorists will continue as the president’s Twitter fingers keep fueling the racist fires than burn within more White males than many people might care to admit.
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