Sam, in the sort of limited time we have left - I know we're getting to the end here - I did want to base with you about
white supremacy a little bit and and manifestos, because I was- I took some criticism years ago when I said
an Islamic terrorist or perpetrator, who states that their motivations were related to Islam,
should be considered genuine and serious, and while there may be other aggravating factors which we can talk about,
that needs to be taken seriously. And I believe that. And in the same way when I hear about,
you know, a perpetrator that is apparently a white supremacist who
was participating in all of the known places on the internet, which I don't even need to name and there's no point in naming them,
and they say that these were motivating factors, I believe- unless I have a really specific reason to think otherwise,
I also believe that they're genuine. And I've seen that you've talked about the idea of those right-wing shooters
sometimes in your opinion writing a semi-bogus manifesto, maybe to confuse the media, maybe to get attention.
And I definitely don't see it that way, absent some evidence that would change my mind.
So I'm curious how you came to that conclusion...
You know, it was just based on hearing some evidence, or alleged evidence, in that area.
And I'm actually- my next podcast is gonna be with Kathleen Belew who's a, you know, historian on this topic of white supremacy.
So I'll sort of dive deeper into that and get a little more of an education there, but-
Yeah, I mean the the issue seems to be that there's this this other variant of, you know, troll culture
that is attracting, in many cases mentally unstable, isolated, you know, socially isolated, young men,
some percentage of whom are just be kind of viewing opportunities for violence as a kind of video game
and this gets mixed in with, you know, some level of racism, or white supremacy, or misogyny, or all of those things,
and it's not clear, you know- What really is the motivating factor?
I mean, again, in some cases violence is over-determined, right? So you have
someone who is is mentally ill, but is also enamored of some bad, you know, violence-producing ideas
and may also have a legitimate grievance in the world, right? And then that person goes into a synagogue,
or a mosque, or a school, and kills people. And then we're left trying to sort out, what was really the operating variables.
But there're pure cases, right, of all of these things, too. Where it's just: you have psychologically normal people
who are motivated clearly by ideas and they state those ideas and there's no reason to doubt them.
Right, and so there are clear cases of every type. I think it's far more common to have
socially marginalized, psychologically unwell people go in and shoot up schools.
And I think it's also far more common to have people fitting that type join white supremacist organizations,
than it is to have those variables be the explanation for jihadism.
The reason why I think jihadism is different than- and I did a solo podcast on this topic differentiating jihadism from white supremacy.
I think it is an importantly different set of ideas, and most important, in a different context, right? It's a-
jihadism is an extremist set of ideas set within a mainstream religion and disentangling those ideas
from the mainstream religious ideas that people truly care about - that, you know, more than a billion people truly care about - is genuinely difficult, right?
And entails theological hair-splitting that is frankly not very convincing, right?
So it's a hard problem and it's for that reason attracting far more, you know, straightforwardly religious, normal people into its ranks.
White supremacy is not quite the same, right? It's not- it doesn't have- it has links to Christianity,
but the links are not as direct, and they're not as not as broad, and they're not as connected to other things
that are good about Christianity, right? The things that people normal people really want about Christianity.
And so I think it is filtering for, you know, unbalanced more deranged people, more marginal people,
people who have less opportunity and more grievances or pseudo-grievances. But then there are cases where,
you know, the violence is coming from, you know, just psychopathy or other psychopathology, right?
Where then whatever lip service may or may not be paid to ideas It really is just lip service.
It's not really the ideas, and you don't know until you know but- Another point, as an example like...
I Think that the Columbine shooting is often talked about in the context of these, you know, online discussions of white supremacist violence.
And I think Eric Harris in his journals wrote a fair amount about, you know, white supremacy.
But- no one who's really looked at the details of the Columbine shooting thinks that this is a clear case of white supremacist violence.
I mean these were really disturbed young men who decided to kill their classmates and,
you know, it's that this was not the Oklahoma City bombing which is which was clearly ideological.
And so it's just- you just don't know until you know. And when I spoke about the El Paso shooting,
and even the Christ Church shooting, it just wasn't totally clear to me. What was what in terms of those manifestos?