Read: Why better mental-health care won’t stop mass shootings

The objections to these explanations occur to us as quickly as they are uttered. People get banged up, mistreated, and passed over for jobs all the time, for good and bad reasons, and do not resort to mass murder. Unsettled by modernity? Take a number. Mine is 5,723,222,310. The most obvious objection of all is the killer’s manifesto, which, for all its smirky, guttersnipe web dialect is extremely clear in its intent and influences. The alleged killer, Brenton Tarrant, is a subliterate foot soldier of white-supremacist neofascism, an ideology that was conceived by European nationalists a century ago, nearly took over the planet, and has come back in a revised form in the past decade. The alt-right leader Richard Spencer has not, to my knowledge, called for violence (and he has been the victim of it), but the overlap between Spencer and Tarrant is vast. And in the absence of that ideology, I dare say 50 more New Zealand Muslims would be alive today.

In dismissing these tendentious explanations so breezily—so breezily that they receive not even a mention—Wajahat Ali is absolutely right. So are the countless other commentators, Muslim and not, who have belatedly come to the conviction that if bad ideas permeate communities (virtual and real), their effect is not incidental but decisive. Ali has, in fact, been direct in his acknowledgment of the role of belief in some contexts. Others have treated it as an embarrassment, especially in their own communities. In the neighborhoods that were targets of recruitment by ISIS, community leaders emphasized nonideological causes publicly. But they all knew, on some level, that ideas mattered, and any parents who detected a whisper of ISIS ideology in their household understood that it was as deadly as bubonic plague.

Almost two years ago, I opined, meekly, that Sebastian Gorka was not wrong about everything. I complimented him for noting the role of jihadist ideology, and then roasted him for botching the particulars of that ideology. Gorka’s view of jihad is monolithic; he believes, erroneously, that “radical Islam” is a vast and united front against which the next patriotic generation should prepare to fight. In fact, jihadism is a complicated network, with mutually antagonistic elements (Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, say) and even some elements that aren’t violent at all.

Read: How white-supremacist violence echoes other forms of terrorism

I regret that the commentators post-Christchurch are imitating Gorka’s main virtue as well as his signature flaw. The transposition is astonishing. Gorka treats Hezbollah like al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood like Hizb al-Tahrir—all different Islamist groups, with salient resemblances; his post-Christchurch doppelgängers seem ready to treat Tarrant like Trump, and Trump like Tarrant. In The New York Times, Omer Aziz accused the neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, as well as the Canadian psychologist and lobster enthusiast Jordan Peterson, of complicity in mass murder for objecting to what they argued are overbroad applications of the word Islamophobia. C. J. Werleman, a columnist for Middle East Eye, tweeted last weekend that “ISIS appeals to roughly 0.0000001% of Muslims,” whereas “right-wing extremism represents the views and attitudes of roughly 30-40% of white people.”