T HEY LOOKED like something out of Donald Trump’s fever dream: a bunch of burly, bearded, tattooed Latinos massed outside a blood bank wielding metal objects. But the objects were spoons and spatulas, and the men were Christians on a mission. Soon after a gunman killed nearly two dozen people at a Walmart, Pastor Anthony Torres and members of his flock stocked their mobile kitchen and drove down from Alamogordo, New Mexico. In the two days that followed they served hundreds of meals to El Pasoans who donated badly needed blood to local hospitals. Asked why he brought nearly a dozen people, a mobile kitchen and hundreds of dollars-worth of food to another city to help people he had never met, Mr Torres just shrugs: “We felt we had to be here.”

The El Paso massacre was the deadliest of three in less than a week—all perpetrated by young men using legally purchased semi-automatic weapons. The death toll, including two shooters, stood at 36: 22 in El Paso, four at a festival in Gilroy, California and ten in Dayton, Ohio, with dozens left injured. America has grown accustomed to such events. There have been 31 shootings with three or more deaths in 2019. On average, according to a research outfit called the Gun Violence Archive, this year has seen one shooting in which four or more people were killed or injured every day.

Two of these attacks—in Gilroy and El Paso—are being investigated as domestic terrorism, raising questions about how police and politicians confront the threat from white-supremacist terror. On July 23rd Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said his agency had made around 100 domestic-terror arrests since October, most of them related to white supremacists. Yet even though, according to the Anti-Defamation League, an NGO , right-wing extremists were responsible for 70% of killings apparently motivated by some extremist ideology in America between 2009 and 2018, the counterterrorism apparatus remains geared more towards catching foreign terrorists than domestic ones.

That stems partly from a legal distinction. Providing money or personnel to a designated foreign-terrorist group such as al-Qaeda or ISIS is illegal. No such statute exists for domestic terrorism, and in any case white-supremacist attacks are carried out by individuals who buy their own guns and radicalise themselves online. Initiating a terrorism investigation based on opinions posted on web forums gets into murky First Amendment waters.

But the imbalance also stems from priorities set at the top. Former counterterrorism analysts say that the government does not devote nearly as much intellectual energy to understanding the ideology of domestic white supremacists, and mapping out paths from ideology to action, as it does to jihadist terrorism—even though, as Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who worked on terrorism, notes, the two ideologies are structurally similar. Both argue that they—Muslims in one case, white people in another—are superior, and need their own separate state ruled by their own people, and are justified in committing acts of violence in their people’s name.

Despite that passing similarity, the path to radicalisation seems different. Jihadist groups recruited through mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where they comprised a negligible share of these firms’ revenue and users. That made it easy for companies and governments to kick jihadists off these sites. White-nationalist extremists use smaller platforms that have no interest in joining the mainstream. Sometimes their service providers step in: Cloudflare, for instance, withdrew its web-security protections from 8chan, a web forum popular with the far right. These sites then pop up elsewhere, hosted in an obscure jurisdiction.

Shortly before he began his attack, Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter, appears to have posted a manifesto on 8chan. He wrote that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—a state that until 1836 was part of Mexico. He railed against immigration and environmental damage, and advocated “decreas[ing] the number of people in America using resources. If we can just get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become sustainable.” Towards that end, he travelled from the suburb of Dallas where he was brought up to El Paso, a majority-Hispanic border city, and opened fire in a store packed with back-to-school shoppers from Mexico. One survivor said he specifically targeted people he thought were Hispanic.

“The Hispanic community,” he wrote, “was not my target until I read The Great Replacement.” This refers to a conspiracy theory that blames feckless Western elites for “replacing” people of European ancestry with non-white immigrants. “The Great Replacement” was the title of a book by a French polemicist. Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man who earlier this year murdered 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand, used it as the title of his own manifesto, which Mr Crusius endorsed.

This is an updated version of an older conspiracy theory known as white genocide, which propounds that the world’s white population is being deliberately shrunk and diluted through mass immigration, low fertility rates, multiculturalism and miscegenation (Mr Crusius also inveighed against “race mixing”). Unsurprisingly, many on the far right believe this to be a Jewish plot.

These beliefs, notes Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League, “are not just on these fringe internet forums. If anyone operating there turned on Fox News, they would hear similar sentiments.” Tucker Carlson, the second-most-popular host on cable news, has said that Democrats want “demographic replacement” through “a flood of illegals”. Laura Ingraham, another host, has argued that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

Prominent politicians have said the same thing. Steve King, a congressman from Iowa, infamously wrote that “we can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.” On the House floor Ted Yoho and Louie Gohmert, both Republican congressmen, have compared immigrants to invaders. During a trip to Europe in 2018, Donald Trump said that immigration has “changed the fabric of Europe”, and told a British tabloid, “I think you are losing your culture. Look around.” More recently, his Facebook campaign ads have warned, “We have an INVASION …It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION .” Take this literally and violence becomes a defensive measure.

Correlation is not causation, but FBI data show a recent uptick in reported hate crimes. Men who killed Jews in synagogues in California and Pittsburgh blamed Jews for immigrant “invaders” and the “genocide of the european race”. Despite the president’s occasional disavowals, these people really like him. The Christchurch shooter called Mr Trump “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”. One researcher who attends extremist rallies (in disguise) reports “unanimous support for Trump…These folks rallied around him. They saw large parts of their messaging getting into the mainstream.”

To his credit, in a speech on August 5th Mr Trump denounced “racism, bigotry and white supremacy”. He also advocated making it easier to commit the mentally ill to hospital, “stop[ping] the glorification of violence in our society” and develop “tools that can detect mass-shooters before they strike”. Missing from the list was a commitment to moderate his own speech, or anything that would make it substantially harder for angry young men to obtain semi-automatic weapons.■