We already know that the border is a distraction and the dangers there are largely fictions. We know that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than US-born people; that most undocumented people in the US got here by overstaying their visas, not coming across the southern border illicitly and that undocumented people are a crucial part of the labor force. But we also know that if you can get people excited about imaginary threats, you can distract them from the real ones, and that often the greatest dangers are the people fomenting the excitement.

Mass shootings show why we must stop pandering to white male fragility | Laurie Penny Read more

We already know that the serious threats are coming from inside the house.

Recently, Trump has been telling lurid and apparently baseless stories about women being victimized by traffickers on the border. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he campaigned on pumped-up stories about Mexico sending rapists to the US. But he had nothing to say about the border patrol agent who killed four women in September, one of them transgender, and was only caught because a fifth escaped from his pickup truck.

Last week, when the US government was partly shut down because of the president’s hostage-taking tantrum tactics to get his border wall, native-born white men – not immigrants, not Muslims – proved, once again, to be a major source of violence and hate in America.

Last week, four young white men were arrested on 19 January, in upstate New York for a plot to kill Muslims in nearby Islamberg; they had 23 guns and “makeshift bombs packed with nails and black powder”. One of them had invited Trump to his Eagle Scout ceremony in 2017.

The same day, Christopher Cleary, a 27-year-old white man from Colorado, was arrested in Provo, Utah, after making credible threats to indiscriminately kill women. According to one report, Cleary “had written a long Facebook diatribe about being a virgin and wanting to become ‘the next mass shooter’”. He was already on probation for stalking and making threats of domestic violence – the sort of history that is common among men who commit mass killings.

And in Florida last Wednesday, a 21-year-old white former prison guard was charged with first-degree murder of five women in a bank. A woman who met him in a psychiatric hospital told reporters: “For some reason [he] always hated people and wanted everybody to die.” These days five deaths aren’t even big news, and the likelihood he targeted women specifically was overlooked in most news reports.

Last week, another young white man went on a killing spree, this time in Louisiana, starting with the 20-year-old woman he had been dating, her 17-year-old brother, and her grandfather. Dakota Theriot, 21, reportedly went on to kill his parents and fled in his father’s truck to Virginia, where he was captured at his grandmother’s house. His grandmother had, according to news reports, fled to a motel out of fear of her grandson.

Crimes like these are happening in a broader context of white male extremists committing far-right attacks. A new report from the Anti-Defamation League finds: “In 2018, domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the US, a sharp increase from the 37 extremist-related murders documented in 2017.” That makes last year “the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970”. What’s more, “every single extremist killing – from Pittsburgh to Parkland – had a link to rightwing extremism.”’

Last week, USA Today reported: “Self-avowed racist James Jackson pleaded guilty Wednesday morning to killing a black man with a sword in 2017, part of his plan to stop interracial relationships and express his hatred for black people.” And this week, two white men reportedly beat and hung a noose around the neck of black gay actor Jussie Smollett.

We know that rightwing extremist violence almost always means white men, and that it usually means racism and misogyny

We know that rightwing extremist violence almost always means white men, and that it usually is accompanied by racism and misogyny – and in the case of last fall’s synagogue massacre, antisemitism. We also know that rightwing politicians have done much to work up their base with fear and with hatred and to normalize violence, the kind that doesn’t get called out enough. The kind that doesn’t get called out enough.

Whatever fears Republicans may stoke about women being abducted on the border, they don’t actually care about violence against women. This is a country where the Republican party fought hard to get a man accused of attempted rape appointed to the supreme court less than a year after they did their best to get Roy Moore elected to the Senate despite the nine women with credible allegations that he sexually abused or harassed them when they were very young. Meanwhile, Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is busily dismantling Title IX protections for campus rape victims while gushing sympathy for those charged with sexual assault.

The border wall distracts us from Trump’s own troubles, including his likely culpability in the collusion with Russia. More importantly, it distracts us from things that actually kill a lot of people, including gun violence, car accidents, disasters, poor air quality and lack of access to medical care – and domestic violence when it becomes domestic homicide, as it does about a thousand times a year.

Climate change, too, is a killer; the Paradise fire, which was partly driven by climate change, killed 86 and left more than 10,000 homeless and jobless, and many are suffering now in the midwest’s power vortex-driven extreme cold, which has caused eight deaths so far. Instead of tackling such threats, the Trump administration is busy rolling back on the 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which could cause more than 11,000 deaths annually from air pollution from coal, in addition to fueling runaway climate change and trashing the Paris climate treaty.

These are the walls that would make us safer: around the fossil fuel industry, to prevent mining and lobbying and burning the filthiest of fuels; around the NRA and those who want guns to proliferate; around racists and antisemites and misogynists and homophobes and the entitlement that lies behind the delusions that anyone has the right to take another’s life; and maybe around the White House.

We’re not going to build them, at least not literally, and we know walls don’t work. But in the meantime it serves us all to remember what is and is not a real threat to real lives. And that the most serious threat is coming from inside the building.