March 18, 2019 update:

“It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.” – David Leonard, New York Times (He offers a good review of Trump’s repeated appeals to violence. Compare this previous post from Agenda Twenty Twenty.)

March 17, 2019 updates:

• “The president is not a white supremacist. I’m not sure how many times we have to say that.” – Rick Mulvaney, Acting White House Chief of Staff on Fox News Sunday.
• Donald Trump defends Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, who was suspended from Fox News over Islamophobic  comments on the air, on Twitter today: “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro.”

Original post:

Q    Do you see, today, white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t really.  I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.  I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that’s the case.  I don’t know enough about it yet.  They’re just learning about the person and the people involved.  But it’s certainly a terrible thing.  Terrible thing.

(Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, March 15, 2019)

Judy Woodruff: Kathleen Belew, again, you have also spent time studying this. What are — what should we be learning from this by now, after all these incidents?

Kathleen Belew: You know, this is a social movement.

I think this is the most important thing to understand. This is an action carried out by the white power movement. It has decades of history in the United States and beyond. It is part of a social groundswell. Its members are deeply connected with one another. And they’re ideologically driven, as my co-panelists have said.

That means that we have to think about how to connect these disparate acts of violence together into one story, so that we can start to think about formulating a response to this as a movement. These aren’t lone wolf attacks. These aren’t individual errant madman. These are political actors who understand what they’re doing to be motivated and purposeful.

And the other thing about acts like this — and I — again, I’m a historian. I study the period from the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is the moment of sort of formation of this movement and its kind of first wave of intense radicalization and anti-state violence.

When we think about acts like the New Zealand shooting, the Oklahoma City, the massacre in Charleston, the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue, these actions are not meant to be end, in and of themselves. The violent action, the mass attack, that’s not the end point of this ideology.

These actors envision these acts as purposeful political statements meant to awaken a broader white public to the urgency of their ideology and to race war.

Judy Woodruff: And race war, literally?

Kathleen Belew: Yes.

That’s why I think it’s important to call this what it is, which is the white power movement. I think, when people say white nationalist or white supremacist, it serves to sort of soften the very radical and revolutionary nature of this activism.

White nationalist makes people sort of think that the nation implied is going to be the nation of the United States or the nation of New Zealand, when, in fact, these activists think about a white nation that transcends national boundaries. They’re pursuing an Aryan nation.

And they’re often doing this violently, with the end goal of ethnic cleansing and race war.

. . .

Judy Woodruff: Kathleen Belew, back to you.

I mean, how do you see, whether it’s the United States or Australia or other countries — but, clearly, we’re a program in the United States — what should, what can this country be doing about this now?

Kathleen Belew: So, when we think about this kind of a movement, it is a fringe movement. It is a comparatively small group of people.

But the thing is that people in fringe movements have outsized capacity for violence and outsized capacity for spreading ideas into other circles. I think that this is a movement — and the history shows this — that has really done a lot of work to disguise itself and to appear as sort of scattered, lone acts of violence.

And we see over and over again the idea of the lone wolf attacker, the madman, a few bad apples, when, in fact, these are coherent and connected actions.

So, the work of contextualizing them, putting them in conversation with one another, and understanding these events as connected is absolutely crucial, if we want to mount any kind of public response.

This movement uses a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is effectively very much like self-styled terror. The idea is that a cell or one man can work to foment violence without direct communication with leadership.

And this was implemented, of course, to stymie prosecution in court. And that’s one level of response. The larger consequence of leaderless resistance has been that our society as a whole has not been able to understand this violence.

(Why alleged New Zealand mosque killer represents a broader ‘social movement,’ PBS Newshour. Kathleen Belew is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and has written extensively about white supremacy movements. )

(Image: screen grab of New Zealand killer.)