The author of the manifesto pronounced himself in “general” agreement with the Christchurch murderer. He opposed racial mixing; he thought America was committing suicide by letting Hispanics “invade.” He intended to kill to counter these trends, and he claimed to be ready to die in the act. He even endorsed, tactically, the targeting of innocent and unarmed people, using the phrase low-security targets (imagine the type of subhuman consciousness that would refer to cowering children this way).

Let’s get back to those fountains of ideas. The very few noteworthy sections of the manifesto are the ones that reveal a broader range of influences than one might suspect. The author reserves his greatest rage not for Hispanics, but for “the takeover of the United States by unchecked corporations.” The corporations, he says, are pro-immigration and befoul our natural environment. Once automation spreads and causes mass unemployment, Hispanic invaders will demand government freebies—specifically a universal basic income (UBI)—and will cause civil unrest if not placated. Oddly enough, the author shares some of these goals, for white people anyway: “Achieving ambitious social projects like universal healthcare and UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of dependents are removed.” The ideal, he suggests, would be automation without immigration, so that the low-paying jobs would go to robots and nonimmigrant Americans would get the good jobs.

Many of these ideas, including some of the most stupid and craven ones, come not from the right, as traditionally conceived, but from the left as well. The left has peddled conspiracies of corporations as diabolical puppeteers (while the right has credulously promoted corporations as angelic job creators). Lack of confidence in job markets’ ability to digest and repurpose displaced workers is typically a concern of the left, and, of course, the Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been the most vocal figure on the subject of job loss due to automation. UBI and health care have been proposed by Swedish-model Democrats and ridiculed by Republicans. The belief that poor immigrants would, if given the chance, fill our welfare rolls and capsize the ship of state—that’s the position not only of the Trump adviser Stephen Miller but also of Bernie Sanders and a long tradition of labor leftists eager to keep “American jobs” safe from immigrants. Combine these ideas, which have traction now in both major parties, with straightforward racism and xenophobia, which have traction in one major party, and you get what we saw yesterday in El Paso.

If you think that this cross-pollination of ideas means Sanders is just as culpable as Trump, then congratulations: You just cannonballed right into the inferno. It is one thing to favor one’s countrymen over one’s potential countrymen, as Sanders does (narrow-mindedly, in my view). It is quite another to cultivate hatred and fear of foreigners, to encourage political violence, and to amplify wing-nut conspiracies that, if true, would implicate millions of people in treason. To my knowledge, only one politician on the national stage has done all of these things.