Opinion: Radicalism kills. Why do we only care about one kind?
By Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum Columnist focusing on national politics and foreign policy Email Bio Follow Columnist March 15 at 3:33 PM It begins with humor. The alt-right’s jokes, a teenage friend assures me, are genuinely funny: They ridicule the pomposities of “mainstream” culture, laugh at political correctness and create ridiculous memes mocking everything, including themselves.
Eventually, you can wind up living in a world in which the vilest forms of racism and hatred seem absolutely normal, in which mass murder is amusing and compassion is for the weak-minded. You can even wind up reading the Daily Stormer, which gets its name from the Nazi Der Sturmer , also once known for its “humorous” caricatures and cartoons.
He claimed, for example, that he had been influenced by Candace Owens, the black “conservative” activist who is probably most notorious for saying that Adolf Hitler was “OK” before he tried to “globalize.” “Her own views,” he wrote, “helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.” Maybe this is true. Or maybe, as the context seems to indicate, these comments were an elaborate game, designed to send journalists scurrying off to write about Owens.
The shooter was anticipating the reaction and trying to shape it. He was also trying to amuse, enthrall and inspire his community. In this sense, white supremacist radicalism, whether aimed at Muslims in New Zealand or Jews in Pittsburgh, differs very little from Islamist radicalism, much of which also happens online. Participants are lured in slowly but soon feel part of a strong alternative, international community, one that has its own language, its own symbolism, its own set of grievances.
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