One of the reasons the race entrepreneurs of the Left are forced to define white supremacy down (Subject-verb agreement is white supremacy! Algebra is white supremacy! Punctuality is white supremacy!) is the fact that actual white-supremacist ideology has so little purchase in American culture. White supremacy is mostly a hobby for miserable dweebs on the Internet.
There is a reason these killers almost always act alone. Other than the occasional Leopold-and-Loeb flavor of a crime such as the massacre at Columbine, mass shooters almost always are solo — because they have no other choice. They do not have a big group of committed comrades ready to join them. They generally do not have many friends, as in the case of the Buffalo shooter, by his own telling.
In the United States, even our white-supremacist organizations aren’t very interested in white supremacy. Think of the Aryan Brotherhood, which is one of the largest groups of its kind, with as many as 20,000 members, and which conducts extensive operations both inside the prison system and in the outside world. The Aryan Brotherhood is highly organized, it has access to money and guns and other resources, and its members are not shy about murder and other violent crimes. When was the last time you heard about the Aryan Brotherhood shooting up a black church or bombing a Holocaust museum? Outside of the requisites of prison life, the Aryan Brotherhood has almost no apparent interest in white supremacy, and its criminal activities are almost exclusively ordinary organized-crime enterprises: drug and gun trafficking, murder for hire, extortion, etc. — profit-oriented crime rather than ideologically inspired crime. There isn’t much profit in white supremacy.
It is of some interest that the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution finds that the share of “hate crimes” committed by whites in the United States is slightly below the white share of the population (non-Hispanic whites make up about 61 percent of the U.S. population and about 55 percent of the hate-crime perpetrators) while African Americans make up a disproportionately high share of the hate-crime offenders (about 12 percent of the population and 21 percent of the hate-crime perpetrators), figures that mirror the National Institute of Justice’s data about mass shootings (52.3 percent white perpetrators, 20.9 percent black perpetrators). It doesn’t seem likely that the numbers would break that way if hate crimes and mass shootings in the United States were primarily the product of white-supremacist ideology.
As I wrote earlier today, ideology is not an especially useful guide in these matters.
On the same day as the Buffalo massacre, a man apparently motivated by Chinese nationalism shot up a church full of Taiwanese people in California. Nobody seriously argues that the United States has a big problem with violent Chinese nationalism. (A big domestic problem, anyway.) I tend to agree with Charles C. W. Cooke that what actually happens in most of these cases is that broken and depraved people hitch themselves to a marginal ideology or another kind of fanaticism before committing their enormities, rather than ordinary people becoming deranged by exposure to corrosive ideas.
There are millions of Americans who cleave to any number of ghastly and evil ideologies, from racism to communism, but very few of them end up committing homicidal spectaculars. And the ones who do commit such crimes tend to resemble one another in certain familiar ways even when they profess diametrically opposed ideologies. What they share is broken lives. The shooter in the congressional baseball episode had a history of domestic violence and weapons violations, was estranged from his wife, was unemployed, and had been living in a van before the attack. The killer in the Waukesha SUV murders was out on bond after having committed essentially the same crime (intentionally running over a woman, with whom he had a child), was a registered sex offender, had a warrant out for his arrest, was unemployed, had a history of being treated with psychiatric medications, etc.
As I wrote earlier, none of this is to say that we shouldn’t care about the spread of white-supremacist ideology or other ideologies of that kind. But they are not going to be very useful in identifying likely terrorists or in preventing terrorist acts.