Remember, Fox News fired ratings king Bill O’Reilly in 2018 not because of allegations of sexual harassment but because more than sixty companies, ranging from Angie’s List to Mercedes-Benz, in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment, pulled advertisements from O’Reilly’s show, seriously affecting its revenue. And it’s not like news consumers will stop watching cable news once it stops sharing frivolous details about mass shooters. Recent experimental research suggests that focusing on the heroic bystander of a mass shooting generates just as much, if not more, interest from readers as the stories about the perpetrators.36
No Notoriety is starting to catch on. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is a supporter. A similar proposal, the “Don’t Name Them” campaign, was recently put forward by the FBI. And in an open letter to the media, 147 experts on mass shootings (coauthor James included)37 pledged support for not naming the shooters or showing their photographs and for avoiding in-depth descriptions of the shooters’ rationales. We can also reduce the duration of news coverage after a shooting; avoid live press conferences, which increase the level of “excitement” around an event; eliminate the perpetuation of clichés and stereotypes about criminals and the causes of their behavior; and lessen detailed accounts of their actions before, during, and after, which can prompt imitation.38
According to new research, the unprecedented reluctance by the New Zealand media to feature the Christchurch mosque shooter as a protagonist or even to publish his name—as modeled by political leaders, notably Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern—helped promote a sense of collective responsibility for change.39 With media concentrating instead on victims and societal issues, within weeks there was a groundswell of bipartisan support for new gun control laws in New Zealand. It’s amazing what can happen when the media choose to focus on solutions, especially solutions ordinary people can apply, not just the terror and tragedy of every shooting.
On the topic of social proof, media education and literacy in homes, schools, and workplaces are key to promoting awareness of media influence and to creating an active stance toward both consuming and creating media. In a socially mediated world, Big Tech must also do more to flag violent content before it is even uploaded or to prevent it from ever being reposted. A bit like how we can time-delay the Oscars to mute celebrities’ profanity, platforms could immediately “hash” (techspeak for “scramble”) any live streamed violence to silence the persuasion of mass shooters, or introduce temporary quarantines so that content is flagged for immediate removal but then reexamined at a later date. There will always be false negatives (i.e., content allowed online even though it incites violence) and false positives (i.e., bits of content that are blocked even though they are benign), but at the very least, the tech giants could adjust the sensitivity of their algorithms so that people are allowed to share content but also so that platforms catch a lot more of the nasty stuff quicker.
Social media platforms could also limit the number of times that violent content can be shared and potentially ban shares between sites. This seems unlikely, given that sharing is a fundamental part of social media and that platforms actively encourage it, but easy sharing is the reason dark matters go mainstream and spread to large audiences. Under a new French law, for example, content judged to be inciting violence (or hatred, racism, or sexual harassment) has to be taken down within twenty-four hours of notification. Failure to remove such content could attract a fine of up to €1.25 million. Also, France’s regulator, the Superior Audiovisual Council, will have the power to impose fines of up to 4 percent of global turnover for companies in continuous and repeated violation.40
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Collectively, we all need to be more alert, more compassionate, and in some cases more restrained in order to stop the mass shooting contagion. With hundreds of hours of material uploaded every minute on platforms like YouTube, the internet still relies on us, the users, to flag content and to hold social media platforms accountable for how they shape us. The foundations of our society now rest, on some level, on our social media system. Yet, this is a system that to date has failed to protect us. As users, we must demand more of social media companies and educate ourselves on how to be better consumers of online content as well as recognize that our own need to process mass shootings by posting about them on Facebook and Twitter can inadvertently feed the “disaster narrative,”41 because any interaction with such content, whether it’s by sharing it or only by “liking” it, can send that content up to the top of the Facebook News Feed.
Performances close their curtains when people stop buying tickets. We must starve mass shooters of the oxygen of publicity they desire. In the end, our attention is our power.
CHAPTER 7
HATE
We arrive at Tyler’s trailer home on a sultry South Carolina summer morning. The home is set back on a wooded plot of land, behind a long dirt driveway punctuated by a handwritten FOR SALE BY OWNER sign.
We walk up the sun-bleached wooden steps and past a neat row of thirty or more empty Bud Light cans lined up in silent vigil along the deck. The front door is wide-open because the air-conditioning is broken, and Tyler is sitting shirtless on the couch, watching the History Channel. Behind him, high on the wall, sits a crossbow and a large deer shoulder-mount taxidermy with a baseball bat perched between its antlers. The trailer is hot and humid. The acrid smell of cigarettes hangs in the air. Flies buzz in and out, and a cockroach or two scurries about a full ashtray and an assortment of tools lying on the coffee table.
Tyler invites us to take a seat next to him. He claims his story is “the only true one” about why, in 2015, his twenty-one-year-old nephew walked into a Bible study at “Mother Emanuel” African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and shot and killed nine people, all African Americans. Tyler is brash like that, a storyteller, crass at times, but charismatic. Between long drags on a cigarette, he has lots of unsavory things to say about his sister, the shooter’s mom, and his niece, her daughter, but it’s clear that he cares deeply for his nephew, who was sentenced to die in prison.
Tyler describes the Charleston church shooter as “smart”—which is true; he has a high IQ—but always lacking the ability to bond and connect with people. He “couldn’t have a conversation” and would “never talk to other people,” Tyler says. He gestures at the three of us sitting down together and indicates that the current situation is one his nephew would not have been able to handle. Tyler recalls a surprise birthday party one year at which his nephew locked himself in his bedroom, refusing to come out until everybody had left. Official records show he has a developmental disorder, autism spectrum disorder, a symptom of which is “polarized” or black-and-white thinking, where people see the world in absolutes and find it difficult to distinguish truth from lies, making them potentially vulnerable to manipulation and indoctrination.1 Tyler doesn’t know anything about that, only that his nephew became increasingly isolated during adolescence, using internet research as the source for his ideas, which eventually became fixed and unchecked by reality.
That part of the story is well-known. After hearing about the 2012 death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on the news, the shooter searched for the case on Wikipedia and determined that George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch coordinator on trial for Martin’s murder, was “in the right” to see Martin as a threat. The Charleston shooter then googled “black on white” crime, and the search sent him tumbling down the rabbit hole.
The Charleston shooter became “fixated on Negro history,” Tyler says. According to prosecutors, he “self-radicalized” online and engaged in a “self-learning process.”2 For people veering toward the fringes, the internet can do that—because you can find almost anything there, you can always find someone or something to affirm your worst instincts. Top hits sent Tyler’s nephew to the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that sounds official but that once called Black people a “retrograde species of humanity.”3
Next, Tyler’s nephew be
came a reader and commenter on Stormfront and the Daily Stormer, two white nationalist websites known for fake news conspiracies. Tyler says of the shooter, “He wanted to be a Nazi. He loved Hitler.” The shooter then downloaded Ku Klux Klan propaganda. He made his own website, the Last Rhodesian, a reference to the former white supremacist state in Africa. In the site, he posted a 2,500-word rant degrading Black people and glorifying slavery. He also posted photographs of himself posing with guns, the Rhodesian flag, the Confederate flag, and the number 1488, which has numerological significance for white supremacists (“14” refers to the fourteen words of American white supremacist David Lane, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”; “88” stands for “Heil Hitler,” H being the eighth letter of the alphabet). “He wishes Hitler was his father” is Tyler’s take on it all.
Tyler wipes sweat from his brow and neck with a folded green T-shirt as he remembers the time his nephew asked his mom for gas money because he was going to Charleston to visit a museum. “Did you know they have an all-Negro church?” he told her. That should have been a red flag. The shooter didn’t have a job, he’d only just gotten a driver’s license, and he otherwise stayed in his room a lot of the time. “Why has he been going to Charleston every weekend for the last two months?” Tyler asks us rhetorically, implying that the shooting was “well planned.”
At this point in the interview, a car pulls into the driveway. A Latinx couple appears in the doorway and asks to meet the homeowner. “How much do you want for the house?”
“I’m the gringo,” Tyler replies. They negotiate for a minute, and Tyler drops a few Spanish words he knows—pesos, ocho, cinco. The woman seems genuinely interested in the trailer, but the man is skeptical. They leave to think it over, and Tyler turns to us and smiles. “These fucking foreigners, man.”
We ask Tyler if he is close to his nephew. He replies, “For a moment in time,” and says that his nephew used to describe him as his favorite uncle. “I used to tell him stories about the real world,” Tyler recalls, laughing. They bonded over their interest in history, Tyler says, pointing to the World War II documentary still playing in the background.
The last time they saw each other, about six months before the shooting, his nephew asked, “Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be with a man?” Tyler says he screamed, “Hell no. It’s an abomination. That’s a fucking faggot.” He reenacts for us how he threw his Bible at his nephew and cited Scripture: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” His nephew allegedly retorted, “How can you say that if you never tried?” Tyler grew angry: “Now I need to talk to your mother because you’re a fucking queer. Now I see why you couldn’t get a girlfriend.” His nephew then walked out.
Tyler has no regrets about that conversation, except that the next time he saw his nephew, it was on the evening news. He recognized him instantly from the security camera footage. “I was in a state of shock,” he says.
We ask if that last argument may have pushed his nephew over the edge, but Tyler is unwilling to go there. So we ask if he ever thought his nephew was capable of such violence.
Tyler shouts, “Fuck no, he was smart!” And with that, he gets up off the couch to urinate off his front deck. The interview is over.
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Mass shootings in places of worship became more frequent starting in the mid-2000s, and the number of shootings motivated by religious hate have increased most dramatically in the last five years since the Charleston church shooting. Some of the deadliest worship mass shootings also occurred within this time frame, including Charleston, and the shooting inside Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, in which a gunman killed eleven people. Before opening fire, the Tree of Life gunman had vented on the far-right social network Gab about Honduran migrants traveling toward the U.S. border and about the alleged Jewish conspiracy behind it. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” he had declared.4
Twenty nineteen was an especially deadly year for attacks on religious groups and places of worship. In April of that year, on the last day of Passover, four people were shot, one fatally, at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California. In December 2019, a shooting at a church in White Settlement, Texas, left two dead and one critically wounded. This followed a mass stabbing that injured at least five people at a rabbi’s house in New York State a week earlier and a mass shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey, two weeks before that, which killed three.
More than a third of all mass shootings at places of worship have occurred in Texas, including the first mass shooting in a church that we know of. That one took place in 1980, in Daingerfield, where a former high school teacher killed five and wounded ten after members of the church refused to appear as character witnesses during his incest trial. Texas was also the site of the deadliest church mass shooting ever: In 2017, twenty-six people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs during a Sunday service. (Because there was no gun involved, our database doesn’t include the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, by Ku Klux Klan members, in which four children were killed and twenty-two other congregants were injured.)
In all, seven of the worship mass shootings in our database (64 percent) occurred in Southern states—four in Texas, two in Louisiana, and one in South Carolina. Wisconsin is the only other state with more than one mass shooting at a place of worship, with one at the Living Church of God in Brookfield in 2005 and another at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek in 2012.
There are two distinct groups of worship mass shooters. The first is motivated by domestic issues: The church is the setting simply because a girlfriend, spouse, or other family member happens to be worshipping there. They typically had criminal records and histories of violence and substance abuse. The second, more predictably, aims to intimidate a specific subgroup and is motivated by ethno-religious hate, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Christian sentiment. The perpetrators of these killings tend not to be members of the congregation. Their attack is born out of some grievance, namely a perceived sense of injustice, a threat or loss, and the need for revenge against the specific group of people they blame for their disappointments. Interesting, three-quarters of all worship mass shooters had recently lost or changed jobs, with most of them having been fired.
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Georgetown psychology professor Fathali Moghaddam argues that the pathway to violence is like a narrowing staircase: Anger and frustration instigate a search for a target to blame that results in an us-versus-them mentality.5 A violent denial of diversity is something many violent extremists share. They want everyone to have the same values and lifestyle. This means that when they encounter people who are different, they distance themselves from those people and dehumanize them. The higher someone moves up the staircase, the fewer alternatives to violent action they see. What ideology does is help mass shooters neutralize, or “switch off,” the moral voice within them that would normally prohibit them from perpetrating lethal violence.
Central to the contemporary white nationalist narrative is the belief that whiteness is under attack and that anyone who is nonwhite or left-leaning politically is conspiring to undermine or “replace” the white race “through means as varied as interracial marriage, immigration, ‘cultural Marxism’ and criticism of straight white men.”6 People who feel powerless or vulnerable are more likely to seek solace in conspiracy theories like the “white genocide.” And it’s especially hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, because their theories are “self-sealing,”7 in that even absence of evidence for the theory becomes evidence for the theory. That is, the reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy, the thinking goes, is because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up.
White nationalism appeals to some of the same working-class white men, particularly younger working-class white men, described in
chapter 2, because they are the last generation of Americans born when white births outnumbered those of nonwhites. Demographic change, increasing racial and ethnic diversity coupled with rising numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, has created a sense of threat for these men. White nationalists are reminiscent of American philosopher Eric Hoffer’s “new poor”—they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame the “other” for their current misfortune.8 What separates this strain of white nationalism from prior iterations is that it doesn’t simply dislike the “other”; it views the other’s very existence as part of a zero-sum game.9
Hate actually looks a lot like fear—unfounded allegations of Hispanic “invaders,” rising Black-on-white crime, and “Jewish” plans to sabotage American sovereignty. Just hours before he opened fire at Walmart, the 2019 El Paso shooter published a short screed disparaging immigrants and warning of an “invasion” of Hispanics. That word is one that President Trump himself used to describe migrants seeking entry to the United States from Mexico and other “shithole countries.” The president’s angry rhetoric and his failure to shame white supremacy throughout his tenure, including on the 2020 election debate stage and immediately after his supporters, dressed in far-right hate symbols, stormed the U.S. Capitol carrying Confederate flags, was responsible for fomenting a rise in hate and, in rare but an increasing number of cases, violence. In May 2019, someone at a Trump rally in Florida responded to the president’s rhetorical question about how the arrival of migrants could be stopped by saying they should be shot. Trump replied, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.”
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The Violence Project Page 14