Don’t Give White Nationalists the Post-9/11 Treatment
Many mass shootings spur pedantic debates about whether an attack “counts” as an act of terrorism. But the man who allegedly shot 22 people dead in El Paso, Texas, left no doubt. According to his manifesto, posted on a favorite political-extremism website minutes before the shooting, he was inspired by other recent white-nationalist terrorist attacks and hoped to stem what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The El Paso shooting has understandably sparked an overdue about what I call the “domestic-terrorism double standard.” As I noted in a 2014 in , when Americans think of terrorism, they tend to focus on the international variety, even though domestic incidents around the world have historically. This is certainly the case in the United States, and yes, I am including atrocities committed by the Ku Klux Klan.
