The Ongoing Threat of White Nationalist Terror
By 
One person was killed and three injured in a shooting at a synagogue in California on Saturday afternoon, the authorities said.
The Poway Station of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said on Twitter that the shooting happened around 11:30 a.m. local time at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., about 25 miles north of San Diego.
A man was taken into custody, officials said. The gunman, identified as a white 19-year-old man, used an AR-style weapon and opened fire on the people inside the synagogue, Sheriff William Gore of San Diego County said at a news conference.
The San Diego police chief, David Nisleit, said that after the shooting, the gunman called the California Highway Patrol to report his location on Interstate 15 in Rancho Bernardo.
Trump’s apologists are now reduced to saying that his speech has been worse than his actions so far, the reverse of this usual pattern. The effect is the reverse, too. When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. He channels the desire for collective aspiration into an attempt to make us worse than we are. The norm against publicly legitimizing Klan-type explicit racism was built up over a long time, calling on white Americans to be better than they were, partly by convincing them that they were better. The norm is still strong enough that Trump grudgingly kind of walked back his comments after the Charlottesville protests last year. But a norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation.