Harvard fellow examines rise — and roots — of white supremacy
Fifty shot dead at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; 11 killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; six murdered at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City; one run over in Charlottesville, Va.; nine gunned down at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Each of these terror attacks by avowed white supremacists appear to have been motivated, at least in part, by some of the same themes articulated in a diatribe by the accused New Zealand shooter: a hatred of Muslims or Jews and a fear that white Christians worldwide will soon be outnumbered and subjugated because of population growth and immigration policies. While social media has recently boosted the resurgence of Nazism and notions of “white genocide” and “racial purity,” their provenance dates back a century. In “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots,” a new essay in The Atlantic, political writer Adam Serwer exhumes a mostly forgotten...