Re - Branding Hate Groups as Fear Groups

I wonder if "hate groups" and "hate crimes" would lose their cachet for young men if they were re - branded as "fear groups" and "fear crimes?"

Indications from the El Paso shooter's online essay are that he came to the border fearing something like this:

[Photo: Still from the film World War Z. If this is what a young man pictures when he thinks of a wall at our southern border, what is the rational, heroic thing for him to do?]

I'd be scared, too, given the narrative of hordes of "murderers, drug dealers, rapists" from "s---hole countries" who are "invading" our Southern Border in a "caravan" of "tens of thousands."

As the El Paso shooter reportedly wrote, this nightmare scenario long pre-dates the President. It's a narrative called The Passing of the Great Race, bestseller by Madison Grant in 1916, an idea now called "White Genocide." [See "White Nationalist Changes His Mind: Heart Came First" in my blog (12/28/2018] Before that, when Lincoln was a candidate for President, the "Know - Nothing Party" saw immigrants from Roman Catholic countries as the same kind of threat. An even older narrative lies behind all of these, the one we heard in the chant at Charlottesville, "Jews will not replace us." According to that narrative, Karl Marx and other Jews use political liberalism to open borders and dilute the "great race." That was the narrative behind the mass shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue last year.

The President is right to connect the El Paso crime to video games. Some teach us it's okay to target Zombies or Nazis because they're so dangerous, they don't count as human. Mowing them down gets likes and laughs. For the same reason, I and the audience at a showing of Tarantino's latest movie laughed at horrific violence visited upon Nazis and zombie - like cultists.

When the President asked what he can do about the "invasion" at a rally in March, someone said, "Shoot them." The audience laughed; the President quipped, "Only in the Panhandle" to more laughs and cheers. That's not the reaction of insane people or haters; it's the reaction of decent, sane people coming together in a pep rally to face something that frightens them.

The El Paso shooter, fearful of the imminent white genocide thinks of himself as a hero standing up for decent real humans against the Zombie Apocalypse. The foolish young man in the basement of the church in Charleston a few years ago said as much about himself, that someone had to stand up for the white race. The insanity isn't in the shooters; it's in the narrative. But let's not call that narrative anything cool like "pure evil" or "hate"; it's fear.