2019-08-10 USA: White People Are Never Alone - Blame Whitey!

[Rev.Cambeul]

There is no such thing as acting alone

Hate groups spent 30 years perfecting a 'lone-actor strategy.' El Paso is their latest win.

Allen Kyke | ThinkProgressBullshit | 10 August 2019

https://thinkprogress.org/racist-hatemongers-spent-30-years-perfecting-a-lone-actor-strategy-el-paso-is-their-latest-win

Excerpt: he recent mass political violence in El Paso, Christchurch, Gilroy, and elsewhere reflects lessons white-power leaders learned 20 years ago, Simi said.

On Independence Day weekend in 1999, a man named Benjamin Smith went on a shooting spree in Indiana. Smith had been a stand-out member of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator, so prolific in recruiting that WCC head Matt Hale had named Smith his "Creator of the Year" in 1998. But his acolyte's decision to play race-warrior left Hale in a bind.

"[Hale] did this whole thing of like, 'Well he was a great Creator, but we don't promote this violence,'" Simi said. "It was this whole wink-and-a-nod type thing."

Around the same time Smith killed two and injured 10 others in drive-by shootings targeting people of color, another white supremacist named Buford Furrow attacked the Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles. Furrow was a prominent member of Richard Butler's Aryan Nation. Butler disavowed Furrow's attack much as Hale had done with his "Creator of the Year."

These and other disavowals "are sincere for pragmatic organizational reasons, but not in terms of moral revulsion," Simi said. "These folks know that they're subject to both civil and criminal consequences."

In Butler's case, he was successfully sued and stripped of his assets following Furrow's attack. In the wake of that accountability, the lone-actor strategy evolved from a suggestion to a movement-wide best practice, Simi said.

Fellow white supremacist Louis Beam had by then been preaching "leaderless resistance" for several years. Beam had first become famous in the movement for helping to burn Vietnamese immigrants' fishing boats with fellow Klansman in the 1970s. But he understood their hateful war was made vulnerable by organizations with member lists and traceable networks of assets.

The transition from member groups to the lone-actor strategy wasn't frictionless, Simi said, but it helped that Beam and others could point to white supremacist martyrs who had assassinated civil rights figures throughout the Reconstruction Era and the ensuing century.

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.

"What I've seen on 4- and 8chan is a lot less disavowal and a lot more just open endorsement: 'Oh the only problem is they didn't kill more people,'" Simi said.