READ YOUR HOFFER:

Over the past several years, a half-dozen white supremacists committed acts of violence under the belief that their country belongs to white people and they must suppress any risk of replacement by force. This delusion led Anders Breivik to kill 77 people in Norway in 2011 and inspired Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. to kill three people outside of a Jewish community center in Kansas in 2014. Elliot Rodger espoused the same notion in 2014 when he killed six people in Santa Barbara, California.* So did Dylann Roof before he killed nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, also composed and shared lengthy white supremacist screeds.

I've read each manifesto as part of my work as a professor and researcher at the University of Connecticut on the intersection of "race," knowledge, media, power, religion, and science. In particular, I focus on whiteness and racism. While there is a diversity of ideas represented under the umbrella of white supremacy, two prominent logics weave their way throughout each manifesto. First, for example, Gendron writes:

White people are failing to reproduce, failing to create families. ... Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic ties, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples.

This is a voice of victimhood, weakness, and panic. But second, and simultaneously, Gendron like many others, proclaims an inherent white racial superiority:

I believe the White race is superior in the brain to all other races. ... The brilliance and creativity found in White's is incomparable to all other races, therefore I believe that White's are superior.

These two tales form the DNA of the white supremacist manifesto. It is a double helix of equal parts inadequacy and superiority, a uniform blend of peril and power. How do two seemingly antagonistic ideas so easily commingle?

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