THE TRUMP BRAND:

Some of the violence we are witnessing as of late, such as the gunman who killed nineteen children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, is inexplicable evil. And some of the violence we are witnessing, such as the gunman who killed ten people in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, is all too explicable: the consequence of White supremacist hatred. Captured alive, the eighteen-year-old Buffalo shooter had placed a lengthy manifesto on the internet championing the Great Replacement theory, the White nationalist conspiracy theory according to which power-seeking elites are plotting to replace the White majority population with Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, and Blacks, thereby destroying the American way of life.

Formerly confined to the fringes, the Great Replacement theory has lately broken into the mainstream. It is pushed on FOX News television by Tucker Carlson--the Father Coughlin of our day--spreading xenophobia and scarcely veiled racism to a massive audience. Donald Trump's incendiary rhetoric about immigration from Mexico--"They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people"--is also echoed in the Buffalo shooter's manifesto, which blasts immigration as an "invasion on a level never seen before in history." The tragedy that has befallen Buffalo must be understood in the context of ideas already put widely into circulation. Even if only a minuscule percentage of the population is a hair-trigger away from committing violent acts, to spread such hatred on highly visible public platforms when deadly weapons are so readily available is to incite bloodshed.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Byman makes plain in his new book, Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism (2022), the problem has been with us for some time. Over the past decades, the United States and the world have witnessed a series of spectacularly bloody attacks perpetrated under the banner of racial hatred.

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