Joan Donovan:

I don't think so. I've seen a lot of people trying to hold the language used by the Trump administration accountable for the way in which people are starting to understand Islamophobia, anti-Semitism as well is you know this word 'invasion' has come up more than a few times. And you know we're dealing here with this manifesto in a very tired white nationalist conspiracy theory about white genocide and the depletion of the the white race. This exists online everywhere for all to see like, it's on every platform. It just hasn't been amplified to this degree because of the violence that was perpetrated in the name of the ideology.

And the point about law enforcement or the FBI, yeah we do know that the U.S. government is looking less and less at you know white nationalist groups in the U.S. and I think that's a really big problem. We're watching this burgeoning movement that, all movements have ebbs and flows, when movements are in most moments of success, there's a lot of fracture the coalition tends to break apart. And so an event like this can actually galvanize or or re animate a movement. And so I'm very happy to see that journalists are not calling up you know any neo nazi that they can find and giving them a new place to air their ideology. What I think is also difficult is you know I really want to talk about strategic silence and in relationship to white supremacist ideology. It's not always the case that we need to treat every single bad thing that happens online as the same thing. I think for white supremacists and white nationalists or white identity extremists, we need to have a very concerted strategy that focuses in on the actors and the influencers.