columbia review

Last weekend (May 14) a gunman shot and killed 10 people, all of them Black, and wounded several others at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y. A violent screed attributed to the suspect, who is white, invoked the “great replacement” theory, a racist delusion whose components have migrated from fringe websites to right-wing media, and cited the influence of 4chan and the Daily Stormer, online hotbeds of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric.

The screed also contained a disturbing rationale for the site of the mass shooting; the suspect’s actions, wrote Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for The New Yorker, “seem to flow primarily from homegrown resentments.” Even when violent extremism is fueled online, its roots — and its consequences — are hyperlocal.

Between 2005 and 2020, right-wing domestic extremists were involved in more than three hundred plots and violent incidents. During the same period, thousands of local newsrooms closed, and local journalism employment plummeted.

The rise in domestic extremism and decline of local news “means a lot less coverage of local hate and extremist events,” Heidi Beirich, an extremism expert, told me last year. “It leads to an undercount in general of how much extremist activity is happening across the U.S.” Coverage of domestic terror is incomplete without deep knowledge of the communities victimized by it.

As Chris Jones, a reporter who covers domestic extremism in Appalachia, told me, “If you don’t understand the place where something happens, you’re preventing yourself from being able to understand why it happens.”

—Brendan Fitzgerald, senior editor

Join our readers whose generous donations are making it possible for you to read our news coverage. Help keep local journalism alive and our community strong. Donate today.