Leaders, experts warn Jacksonville shooting not isolated

On a recent Saturday, two different neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups marched with swastika flags outside Walt Disney World in  Florida and on a highway overpass just minutes away from a Holocaust memorial museum in the Orlando area.

The larger group that demonstrated on the overpass — identified by the Anti-Defamation League and reporters on the ground as Blood Tribe — spewed anti-Jewish epithets, including “Jews will not replace us,” which was chanted at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The demonstrations came exactly one week after a gunman armed with a swastika-adorned assault rifle killed three Black Floridians at a dollar store in Jacksonville. Officials, including those in law enforcement and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said manifestos left behind by the shooter laid out his explicitly racist motives and his desire to kill Black people. (They have not been made publicly available.)

What little that is publicly known about the gunman, his history and his motives suggest the shooting was not an isolated act of a single madman, experts say, but instead was part of a larger pattern of white supremacist terrorism as well as a right-wing movement in the U.S. that has fostered an environment where such violence has taken the lives of dozens of Black, Asian, Latino, Muslim, LGBTQ+ and Jewish Americans in the past decade.

It’s an argument that’s been made by ground-level activists, experts on white supremacist terrorism, Black civil rights leaders, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, AFL-CIO leadership, members of Congress and President Joe Biden.

“White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison. It’s been allowed to grow faster and faster in our communities,” Biden warned in a speech to civil rights leaders at the White House last week. “To the point where the U.S. intelligence community has determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat you face in the homeland.”

Biden connected the proliferation of white supremacist ideology with the policies being pursued by Republicans across the country where “history is being erased. Books are being banned… diversity has been attacked.”

The Democratic president — whose first two words in his 2020 campaign launch video were “Charlottesville, Virginia,” and has repeatedly said that the white supremacist rally was the impetus behind his presidential run  — was not alone in this assessment. 

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond – the No. 2 official for America’s largest union and one of the highest ranking Black labor leaders in U.S. history – decried policies that dictate what Florida public school teachers can teach about history and race after meeting with Biden last week. He said the state is “tearing up, throwing away school books” as he stood alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s children, the Rev. Al Sharpton, NAACP officials and other civil rights leaders to call for a summit on hate in Jacksonville.

House Democratic leadership, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, issued a statement after the Jacksonville shooting criticizing “elected officials and presidential candidates who peddle poisonous attacks on our diverse society, target historically vulnerable groups, ban books and minimize the pain caused by organized terrorists like the KKK” for “recklessly fanning the flames of racial hatred.”

The leaders called on Republicans to “cease and desist their dangerous actions immediately.”

Advocates point fingers at DeSantis’ rhetoric, legislative record

DeSantis was quick to denounce the attack in Jacksonville, labeling the shooter as a “coward” and “deranged.” He swore his state wouldn’t allow people “be targeted based on their race” and pledged more funding for security at historic Black colleges after it was revealed the gunman first visited a nearby campus of Edward Waters University, a predominantly Black school.

But some advocates and elected officials say DeSantis’ policies have helped inflame racial divisions and stoked grievances against Black Americans and other minority groups.

They point to DeSantis pushing for and signed legislation in his state that made it easier for Floridians to petition schools to remove books. Hundreds of books have been banned, typically focused on issues of race and gender, according to the century-old freedom of expression advocacy organization PEN America.

The Florida governor – who is running for the 2024 GOP nomination – has also banned an Advanced Placement African American studies course for high schoolers, launched a crusade against teachings about systemic racism at public schools and universities and has largely forbidden instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for kids K-12.

“All of this was unfortunately brought on by Gov. DeSantis from his rhetoric and everything he’s been doing in his term,” Mark Talley, the son of a victim of last year’s racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, told Spectrum News. “He wants to put the lack of emphasis on minorities, African Americans in particular… you have people that feel that he is a spokesperson for their racism.”  

“It’s not a coincidence that you have all these manifestos that’ve been written by these terrorists which proclaim their hatred for African Americans,” Talley said.

A DeSantis campaign spokesperson pointed to the governor’s denunciation of the Jacksonville attack and legislation he signed in Israel earlier this year “that imposes steep penalties on anti-Semitic crimes committed in the state.”

“Ron DeSantis condemned the racially motivated murders in Jacksonville repeatedly in the strongest possible language and took swift action to surge resources for security at Florida [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] like Edward Waters University. And DeSantis’ position on Antisemitism has been clear and consistent: it is unwelcome in Florida,” campaign press secretary Bryan Griffin. “He will not tolerate racial hatred or violence in Florida.”

In response to questions from Spectrum News, Griffin went on to denounce “attempts by the media … to politicize these issues by collecting and amplifying false talking points from political opponents.”

Journalist Robert Evans has long tracked the evolution of the American far-right and was a key figure in deciphering the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In the hours after the Jacksonville attack, he described the shooting as part of “a decentralized right-wing insurgent campaign.”

“I don’t think you have to really stretch at all to see that there’s ties of affinity between people here,” Evans told Spectrum News, later adding: “It is not hard to find close connections between that kind of person and the mainstream GOP.”

Republican politics and white supremacy

A little over 24 hours before the Jacksonville shooting, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy denied the existence of white supremacy in the U.S. and said a Black congresswoman was equivalent to the modern Ku Klux Klan – a position he defended after the attack. 

Other prominent Republican leaders have embraced the Great Replacement Theory, a racist and false conspiracy theory that powerful, shadowy elites seek to replace America’s majority white population with a more diverse one. 

The theory has been cited as inspiration for mass violence by the Christchurch shooter; a gunman who shot up a synagogue in Poway, California in 2019; a white nationalist who targeted Hispanics and murdered 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019; an antisemite who killed 11 Jews and wounded six others at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and a self-described fascist who killed 10 people and injured three in a mass shooting targeting Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, last year.

“They embrace alt-right ideologies. They embrace racism and anything that doesn’t correlate to their beliefs, their values, or what they believe and hold true is fake news,” said Talley, who lost his mother Geraldine in the Buffalo shooting. Talley, the author of “5/14: The Day The Devil Came to Buffalo,” argued that spreading these ideologies has helped encourage the kind of violence that killed his mother and was seen again in Jacksonville.

Nearly one-third of Americans believe “that a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants or electoral gains,” according to a May 2022 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The legacy of the Christchurch attack

When examining the tactics of the Jacksonville gunman and racist mass killers that came before him, experts have said there are connections that may not be known to average Americans grappling with news of yet another tragic, horrific attack.

“At the very least that we can say to a point of certainty is that the aesthetics of this attack were influenced heavily by the Christchurch attack,” Evans said of the Jacksonville killings.

The Christchurch shooter was a 28-year-old white Australian man radicalized on social media, according to a comprehensive report issued by the New Zealand government in the months after the attack. He posted his manifesto online, livestreamed his murders on Facebook and brought with him half-dozen firearms on which he wrote more than 200 references “reflecting his extreme right‑wing, ethno-nationalist and Islamophobic ideology,” according to the report.

No livestream of the Jacksonville attack has surfaced, but the gunman authored several manifestos, drew swastikas and wrote several apparent references to white supremacist phrases and jokes on his rifle. 

In Buffalo last year, the mass shooter in his manifesto named the Christchurch gunman as an inspiration. On his guns and equipment, he wrote some of the same phrases and symbols the Christchurch shooter had on his weapons. 

Evans says several other attacks in the years since Christchurch have mimicked the tactics used there. 

“I’ve never seen anything read the way that manifesto did and the fact that we’re now what? Seven, eight, probably more like 10 or 11 copycat attacks just from that manifesto is evidence of how effective it has been on its own as a piece of inspirational propaganda,” Evans said.

The violence did not begin in Christchurch, and he believes it won’t end in Jacksonville. 

“I can’t say what’s in their hearts. I think that they have all made peace with the idea that to some extent, the utilization of these tools in order to increase their political power, in order to increase their engagement, in order often to just make money,” Evans said. “And those consequences include violence and threats of violence to large numbers of people.”