On Saturday—six months to the day after a gunman killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh—another gunman opened fire at another synagogue, Chabad of Poway, near San Diego, California. It was the last day of Passover. The shooter killed Lori Kaye, a 60-year-old woman, and injured three other people, including an eight-year-old child and Yisroel Goldstein, the synagogue’s rabbi. (According to eyewitnesses, Kaye threw herself in front of Goldstein, potentially saving his life.) In Washington, President Trump said the hate crime was “hard to believe.” In fact, given the present, heightened visibility of white supremacy and white-nationalist terrorism, the Poway shooting was sickeningly easy to believe. “The state of our union is horrified, again. Horrified,” Jake Tapper said, introducing his show, State of the Union, on CNN.

Even the details of these horrors are becoming repetitive. As with the Pittsburgh murders, in October, and the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month, the specter of online radicalization again reared its head in Poway. NBC’s Ben Collins—who noted, on Twitter, that he was “tired of writing the same story over and over again”—and Andrew Blankstein report that the suspected Christchurch and Poway shooters appear to have posted “near identical” notes on 8chan’s /pol/ board, a forum crawling with neo-Nazis, prior to shooting Muslim and Jewish worshipers, respectively. In his note, the Poway shooter cited Pittsburgh and Christchurch as inspiration; he linked to the same document-dumping sites as the Christchurch shooter, and also to a Facebook page, where he promised to livestream his attack. (Unlike the Christchurch shooter, the Poway shooter appears not to have gone through with the livestream.)

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The suspected Poway shooter repeatedly asserted that 8chan had radicalized him. As The New York Times’s Charlie Warzel writes, the note was steeped in discourse common to the forum and to the Extremely Online far right more broadly. “It seems real-world murderous hate crimes have become a message board meme of sorts. And like any online meme, the creation cycle only seems to be accelerating, refining itself and, horrifyingly, increasing in frequency,” Warzel notes. “Its effects are morphing into the real world and spreading violence.” 8chan users commonly egg each other on to weaponize their hate offline. A response to the Poway post encouraged the shooter to “get a high score”—a disgusting, gamified reference to human lives.

White-nationalist terrorists are not lone wolves. Their murderous violence is deeply communal: perpetrated at the urging—and for the entertainment—of gawking audiences in dark corners of the web. For the press, fully understanding terrorism emanating from extremist communities, then contextualizing it for news consumers, is always a daunting challenge. Sites like 8chan double the difficulty because the “toxic in-jokes” they traffic in are intended, in part, to hoodwink and humiliate journalists. As Robert Evans, a writer at open-source investigative website Bellingcat, explains, “shitposting” is a strategy to mask the full, menacing extent of far-right extremism by trivializing it. “What should we take seriously?” Evans asks. “The Nazi stuff. Take the Nazi stuff seriously.” He continues: “No matter what else is discussed, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, hatred of LGBT individuals, and a desire to commit murder under the swastika are constant through-lines.”

In all likelihood—and against all hopes to the contrary—we are going to have to cover attacks like Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and Poway again. In the meantime, we should all urgently educate ourselves about the online hate dens that are helping to spawn them. That doesn’t mean amplifying the hate—for example, by sharing murder “manifestos.” Nor does it mean mistaking the shitposting for its deeper causes; as Warzel writes, “The medium by which a shooter is radicalized is only one component of a long path to violence, and mass shootings and anti-Semitic violence have a long, dark legacy.” We need to explain what’s distinct and what’s linked about far-right hate and the online culture that channels it, all while keeping real-world victims front and center. It’s a tough ask. First, we need to understand what we’re dealing with.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.