Last month, I summarized the first two Times editorials in its series on the danger of extremist violence and possible solutions.
As you know, I run almost no media editorials in this blog. But this series contains content that seems to me worth our focus, and I want to summarize it as time permits. Let’s take a look at editorial three, which the Times published on Nov. 19.
"One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way,” the Times says.
White supremacy has been part of the story of the United States since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import, says the Times. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who's written that immigrants with high birthrates are a threat to white European society.
The idea of a hostile replacement by immigrants has gained some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina. While extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, the mainstreaming of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some people, the Times says.
And that’s why it's alarming to see the great replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe, including Jordan Bardella, who's been confirmed as the successor to Marine Le Pen as head of France’s leading far-right party, says the Times. The idea been cited approvingly by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Tucker Carlson of Fox News talks about it often.
A poll by The Associated Press-NORC this year found that about one in three American adults believes that “a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Last year a poll found that 61 percent of French people believe it, too.
While domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, a pervasive problem is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists, the Times says. Too often, extremism researchers say, there’s a reluctance in white-majority nations to see white extremists as threatening as nonwhite foreigners.
The United States is also newer to thinking about white extremism as a transnational problem, the Times says.
The Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, released last year, needs more attention and urgency from lawmakers and the public, says the Times.
An approach tried in about a dozen countries around the world is de-radicalization programs, which encourage extremists to change their minds or at least reject violence. The U.S., German and British governments have had some success with de-radicalization programs aimed at white supremacists, the Times says.
One of the difficulties of the domestic effort against far-right and white supremacist extremists is that the government’s response has to try to avoid alienating people who believe in things like expansive gun rights or strict limits on immigration yet reject violence, the Times says. Often, they're the only credible messengers who can reach deeply radicalized people and talk them back from a more violent course.
Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation, though that alone won't purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages, the Times says.
Yet “if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade,” says the Times.
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