The Atlantic

How Many Attacks Will It Take Until the White-Supremacist Threat Is Taken Seriously?

FBI Director Christopher Wray said recently that the bureau doesn’t “investigate the ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence.”
Source: Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters

Updated at 2:34 p.m. ET on August 4, 2019.

There was, it seems, no time to avert the massacre.

The anti-immigrant, white-nationalist manifesto heralding an imminent attack was uploaded to the online message board 8chan only minutes before a shooter killed at least 20 people out shopping on a late-summer Saturday in El Paso, Texas.

But in another sense, if U.S. authorities that the document was written by the 21-year-old white male suspected of committing the atrocity, then there was plenty of time—numerous years in which violence by far-right, white-supremacist extremists has emerged as arguably the premier domestic-terrorist threat

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