Like a number of recent mass shootings, the one in El Paso on Saturday came with a manifesto. …
In the El Paso manifesto, the anti-immigrant rhetoric is thoroughly ensconced in other white power ideas. To be sure, mass attackers today have a new set of coded phrases, such as “replacement,” as a code for racial annihilation through intermarriage, immigration and demographic change. But the idea of that threat has been central to white power activism for decades.
To people in this movement, the impending demographic change understood by many commentators as a soft transformation — the moment when a town, a county, or a nation will no longer be majority-white — isn’t soft at all, but rather represents an apocalyptic threat. CONT.
Kathleen Belew (U. of Chicago) New York Times