Gunman accused of murdering 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue held the belief that Jews ‘were committing a genocide to his people’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

After he was taken into custody, the gunman who allegedly murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue told a law enforcement officer his motive: he believed Jews “were committing a genocide to his people”.

The “genocide” comment, described in the criminal complaint against Robert Bowers, mirrors the online trail of white supremacist comments posted by a “Robert Bowers” on Gab, a social network popular with extremists.

Together, the law enforcement account and social media profile suggest that the alleged gunman was deeply familiar with the current conversations within white nationalist groups, and that he may have been radicalized online.

Bowers’ neighbors in Pittsburgh told reporters that the 46-year-old had shown no obvious signs of violence or extremism, and that he did not even have any bumper stickers on his car.

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But the “Robert Bowers” account on Gab was familiar to an anti-fascist activist in Charlottesville, Virginia, where members of multiple white supremacist groups marched openly with torches in August 2017, chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”

The activist had saved screenshots of “Robert Bowers” interacting on Gab with a white supremacist who was harassing her, and who told her he was looking forward to the confrontation between them.

“This is my daytime soap. Thanks,” he wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Bowers. Photograph: AP

Bowers’ “genocide” comment, reportedly made to a Swat officer while in custody and receiving medical treatment, appears to refer to a conspiracy theory at the heart of current white supremacist activism, according to experts who study extremism.

The white supremacist “genocide” conspiracy suggests that demographic and social changes under way in the United States and other countries – including immigration, admission of refugees, an increase in mixed-race marriages and mixed-race children, support for multiculturalism, and feminism – are all part of a secret plot to destroy the white race.

The use of “genocide” rhetoric in white supremacist publications dates back at least to the 1970s, when American white supremacists were particularly concerned with intermarriage between black and white Americans, which they viewed as a form of genocide, according to Jessie Daniels, a sociologist who has written two books about American racist movements.

David Lane, a member of a violent white supremacist terror group The Order, is credited with popularizing the term more broadly. Lane, who died in prison in 2007 after being sentenced to 190 years for crimes including The Order’s assassination of a Jewish radio host, coined a statement of faith for white supremacists that includes the promise that they will fight for “white children”.

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Marilyn Mayo, a director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which monitors American hate groups, said: “Whites will become a minority in the United States within a relatively short time. That is something that is happening, and they see that as genocide. That’s how they define ‘genocide’; the white race will not be the dominant race in the United States any more.”

Joan Donovan of the Data and Society Institute, who specialises in identifying media manipulation tactics, said the “genocide” term is used by white nationalists in the hope that people will go online in search of a definition and be led to supposedly informative websites and videos which have been made by white nationalists.

Analysis of the “Robert Bowers” account on Gab, an alternative social media network popular with white nationalists and antisemites, showed him as someone who had been paying close attention to white supremacist propaganda and internal debates within American white supremacists groups, including their post-Charlottesville debates over the “optics” of engaging in violent street protests, and whether that was likely to win more Americans over to their cause.

But “Robert Bowers” also appeared to be a fringe figure. One anti-fascist activist who regularly monitors white supremacists on Gab said she had only captured a few interactions between the “Bowers” account and a well-known white supremacist known among activists for his sustained campaign to harass and dox anti-fascists, making their names, home addresses and contact information public.

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The activist, a 29-year-old Charlottesville resident known online as “Molly”, shared her full legal name with the Guardian, but asked that it not be published, because of the harassment she faces from white supremacists, including efforts to identify and target members of her family.

The Gab interactions she captured, all in 2018, show “Bowers” making misogynistic remarks and encouraging harassment of her as well as engaging in his own casual harassment.

In July, the activist said, she had texted another researcher friend about the “Bowers” account, asking if the friend knew anything about him, but she said she was soon distracted by other accounts.

In all, she estimates, she and other anti-fascist volunteers are monitoring about 1,000 white supremacist accounts in different online networks. She personally monitors about 50, she said.

Despite their virulent racism and antisemitism, nothing about the “Bowers” Gab posts seemed exceptionally dangerous, the activist said. Most of his posts showed “a very formulaic hatred of Jews, and it’s so common on Gab, that it becomes background noise”.

“It’s all so bad, that it didn’t stick out,” she said. “It didn’t warrant any special attention.”

In the past three years, the “genocide” conspiracy has increasingly crossed over onto more mainstream platforms.

In January 2016, the then presidential candidate Donald Trump retweeted a photo mocking one of his Republican primary opponents from an account named “@WhiteGenocideTM.”

Whatever the intention, or lack of intention, behind the retweet, it was “a huge turning point to have a presidential candidate retweet this avowedly, openly white supremacist account”, Daniels, the sociologist who studies white supremacists, said.

Among white supremacists, including those “on the fence” about Donald Trump because of his Jewish son-in-law, the retweet was interpreted as a signal of support, she said.

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White supremacists were encouraged again by Trump’s decision to respond to their violent street rallies in Charlottesville last summer, which ended in a car plowing through a crowd of counter-protesters, leaving 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead, by condemning “both sides” for the violence, and arguing that, “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”

While Trump was “not on our side”, one American neo-Nazi leader said immediately after Charlottesville, “It’s the first president I’ve ever seen that wouldn’t just outright condemn.

“Maybe he has a more nuanced position than most presidents previous to him,” the neo-Nazi leader said.

Over the past year, one element of the broader “genocide” theory, the conspiratorial claim that white farmers in South Africa are being targeted for ethnic cleansing, has been picked up by rightwing media figures in the US, UK and Australia, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

In August, after the latest Carlson segment about white farmers in South Africa, Trump tweeted about the issue, elevating the white supremacist conspiracy to an international diplomatic issue.

Those who study extremism say that more mainstream political rhetoric about the end of “western civilization” or “western culture” is linked to the conspiracy about a “genocide” of white people.

“White supremacists take it as a dogwhistle to them that they agree with their idea about white genocide, even if [mainstream politicians] are talking about ‘cultural changes’ or ‘demographic changes’,” Mayo said.