When the shooters are white, male, and far-right, the story shifts from terrorism to “troubled loners” and the silence from MAGA supporters and Christian Nationalists is deafening.
Yet the script remains the same. The shooter is called a troubled young man, mentally unstable, misunderstood. His violence is described as sudden rather than cultivated, his actions framed as shocking rather than predictable. The words used to describe him soften, as if language itself must protect him. Reporters speak of broken families, missed warning signs, untreated depression. Politicians shake their heads and insist nothing could have prevented this. But when the shooter is not white, when the killer does not resemble the sons of senators or the nephews of governors, the words harden. Immigrant. Terrorist. Gang member. Radical. The same act is recast through a racial lens, and the nation accepts the double standard as though it were logic.
James Baldwin warned that America’s genius lies in its ability to avoid facing its own crimes while demanding accountability from others. His words echo in every news cycle where white violence is excused and Black grief is criminalized. Conservative commentators insist that the real danger comes from Democrat cities, a phrase that everyone understands to be code for Black, Brown, immigrant, and queer communities. They rail against gangs, another dog whistle that shifts attention from the white men shooting up schools to imagined threats in neighborhoods they already despise. They label Antifa as terrorists, though no Antifa member has committed a mass shooting, while ignoring the fact that nearly every headline massacre has been carried out by someone who would identify as conservative, far right, or Christian Nationalist.
The hypocrisy of Christian Nationalists is glaring. These are people who demand that the nation mourn culture warriors like Charlie Kirk with reverence, who call for civil war when one of their icons is harmed, who circulate columns where conservative writers openly admit that yes, this is a call for violence. Yet when white men slaughter Black shoppers in Buffalo or children in Nashville or Latino students in Uvalde, the silence is absolute. The pulpits go quiet. The podcasts switch topics. The politicians who quoted scripture the day before suddenly speak only of thoughts and prayers. They insist that the deaths are sad but unavoidable, that freedom requires sacrifice, that God’s will is mysterious. What they will not say is that the blood is on their hands, because the killers are their disciples, their listeners, their parishioners.
It is accurate to say that far-right Christian Nationalist media and influencers have been romanticizing the idea of a righteous civil war and normalizing guns inside pews, and that this rhetoric is not merely symbolic but practical recruitment. You see pro-gun bumper stickers in church parking lots and hear the language in the pulpit. You hear it on right-wing podcasts and in cable monologues. Talking heads and officials from across the movement, hosts, pundits, state leaders, appointees, and the president repeat themes of vengeance, restoration, and holy duty so often that the speech acts as training. Figures on the airwaves and inside the halls of power celebrate martyrdom, equate political decline with moral failure, and frame force as the proper remedy. They do more than speak. They broadcast instruction and permission, and some of their followers are answering the call with real-world violence. Saying this is not conspiratorial. It is descriptive of a visible pattern: rhetoric that glorifies armed response is circulating in the very spaces where parishioners and listeners are taught that their political identity is also a sacred identity, and that sacred identity gives license to violence in pursuit of purity and power.
The press has a role in enabling and obscuring this pattern. Mainstream outlets present these tragedies in a way that extracts ideology from the story and substitutes pathology. If the shooter is white, he is a troubled soul. If he is not white, the coverage narrows quickly into questions about community, religion, migration, and culture. This is not an accident. It is a narrative choice that has real political effect. Networks that accuse others of bias then bend to avoid offending the administration or its base. When coverage challenges the ruling party, the charge of leftist propaganda follows. When coverage amplifies the administration, applause arrives. The result is a press ecosystem more apt to flatten hard facts into safe frames than to follow the trail where it leads. When pundits and hosts normalize violent language and politicians flirt with authoritarianism, newsrooms too often look for balance instead of truth. They quote both sides and let that balance mask complicity. The consequence is public confusion and political cover for extremism.
The data is stark and unambiguous. Databases that track gun violence and federal crime statistics show that the majority of mass shooters in the United States are white men, often radicalized by extremist ideas or drawn to conspiratorial thinking that affirms their sense of dispossession. From the early-century massacres to the most recent headlines, the demographic profile is repeatable. Many of the killers left online trails, manifestos, or social footprints that connect to far-right forums, podcast episodes, and social accounts where grievance is cultivated into a narrative of righteous retribution. Replacement theory, the language of cultural collapse, and apocalyptic metaphors thread through many of the manifestos and social posts. That is not coincidence. It is, again, recruitment.
Meanwhile, the political architecture of this moment compounds the problem. Republicans now control all three branches of government, and budget fights and policy priorities tell a clear story. The continuing resolutions and appropriations being debated do more than manage money. They codify values. Proposals to slash social safety nets, to weaken healthcare protections, to cut oversight and redirect funds toward contractors and the well-connected, all have predictable human effects. In the short term, shutdown politics means furloughed federal workers, delayed contracts for social programs, and increased financial stress on households that can least afford it. In the long term, stripping support for education, for mental health services, and for community intervention programs creates wider social fissures. A society that underfunds help and overspends on weaponry is a society that tells its citizens that force is the primary language of power. That message resonates in sermon halls and chat rooms alike.
The economic and policy choices are not separate from the violent rhetoric. They are partners. A government that prioritizes the strong over the vulnerable and then tells people to rely on faith, family, and arms to survive is hosting a recipe for escalation. Add to this the spectacle of profit and power at the center of the regime. Since returning to office, the president and his family have seen private wealth swell as political privilege expands. Official platforms are used for branding and merchandising. International forums are converted into sales stages. Statements about foreign policy are used to curry favor with allies and potential payers. The mixing of personal enrichment with public office corrodes democratic norms and softens the boundary between statecraft and commerce. It signals to followers that personal aggrandizement is an acceptable form of patriotism. That lesson feeds the same tribes that are taught to valorize dominance and to see dissent as treason.
Abroad the fallout is immediate and ugly. Allies and adversaries alike watch a country that always claimed a special obligation to human rights act with alarming selective interest. When the United States arms, funds, or blesses violence under the banner of strategic advantage while policing the moral conduct of other nations, the credibility of its rhetoric collapses. Where the U.S. once offered asylum and advocacy, it now exports fractured doctrine: might as morality and domination as diplomacy. That shift matters not only in foreign capitals but on the streets of American towns where a new generation reads those signals as permission. The languages of counterinsurgency and the vocabulary of holy war bleed across the same screens that broadcast domestic politics.
The consequences are not only local. The television images of protests suppressed, of civilian casualties ignored, of shrill nationalistic rhetoric embraced, become a syllabus for movements that wish to imitate power without inheriting restraint. In the spaces where young, dislocated men gather online and in garages, these lessons are converted into operational ideas. This is not to pretend all individuals described by the same demographic are conspirators or that ideology alone determines action. Most people do not become killers. But ideology lowers the threshold for violence. It creates a moral frame in which certain classes of people are dehumanized and certain acts of aggression are framed as necessary or noble. When a culture increasingly sanctifies force and diminishes empathy for targeted communities, the number of people willing to move from talk to action grows.
The rhetorical environment matters in policy and in pulpits. The moral accounting must include both the speakers and the institutions that host them. A pastor who equates political defeat with spiritual damnation and a cable host who invites callers to fantasize about a national purge both contribute to the same climate. A governor who uses biblical imagery to demonize opponents and a podcaster who amplifies threats both play roles in radicalization. These are not equivalent in degree necessarily. They are equivalent in the direction in which they steer public sentiment. The cultural ecosystem that normalizes violent metaphors, that celebrates martyrdom and patriotism as interchangeable, that reframes the legal process as an obstacle to righteous action, is the ecosystem in which massacres find purchase.
That is why naming matters. Calling these acts what they are, identifying the common threads of rhetoric and recruitment, is the first step toward prevention. The second step is accountability. Media must stop sanitizing violent speech in the name of balance. And if they won't, then we should and will. Religious leaders must decide whether faith is a refuge of love or a rallying cry for conquest. Political leaders must choose between stewarding institutions that protect all citizens and cultivating tribes that reward cruelty with applause. Policy must address the root drivers, which are not only access to weapons but the social dislocation, economic precarity, and ideological ferment that funnel disadvantaged and angry men toward lethal choices. Gun laws matter. So do investments in education, mental health, and community resilience. So does regulation of predatory platforms that monetize conspiracy.
None of this will be easy. Nothing worth changing ever is. But the alternative is to continue accepting a slow bleed disguised as a series of exceptions. To continue pretending that each massacre is an unpredictable anomaly is to consent to the very conditions that make them predictable. Baldwin wrote that not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced. America has been practicing avoidance for too long. We rationalize, we debate the semantics of tragedy, we erect ritualized moments of grief that require no change. Meanwhile families bury their dead and communities live in fear of the next headline.
The choice before us is simple and terrible. Either we name the epidemic and then act on that naming, or we learn to live with mass death as normal. The moral imperative is to reject normalization, to demand courage from our institutions, to insist that speech that incites be treated as a public health threat, and to reframe patriotism as the protection of all citizens, not the domination of some. The longer we delay, the more the pattern deepens and the harder it will be to reclaim what remains of the public good. The funerals will not stop until the rhetoric does. The guns will not stop until the culture that blesses them is changed. The blood will not stop until we confront the country we helped create.
We can start by calling it by its name. We can start by refusing to let language soften the deed. We can start by telling the truth about who the killers are, what fed them, and why their violence is political, not merely personal. If we do not, we will have to live with the knowledge that silence was a choice and that our silence cost lives. The time for excuses is past. The time for facing it is now.
Tasha Monroe
Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.
Writer & Editor, The Commons Dispatch