This is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.

When events like the shooting in El Paso happen, the elements may indeed be obvious.

Guns, hatred, alienation. But the obvious is also reductive and risks obscuring larger forces at play.

What seems like an ad hoc spasm of violence actually flows from calculation

and organized cultivation. Also often mischaracterized is the vocabulary of race violence. White

nationalist, white identity, alt-right, white supremacy, white power. They're used interchangeably, which further clouds the

picture, because interchangeable they aren't. After the attacks in Christ Church New Zealand earlier

this year, we spoke to University of Chicago professor Kathleen Ballou. She told us that the

mosque shooting there was not just born of resentment and paranoia or even

radical racism, but of a clearly defined revolutionary movement, the white power movement.

Unfortunately, given recent events, that interview is once more an important lesson.

Why do you specify white power versus, say, white supremacy?

I think the closest term would be white nationalism.

But the thing is that when we talk about nationalism,

a lot of people think about sort of an overexertion of patriotism, and the assumption there is that

the nation implied in white nationalism is going to be the United States or New Zealand. In fact,

the white power movement is interested in a transnational white population that is attempting to

seize control of first white homelands and then eventually the world as a white nation.

And for this reason, I think white power is a better term for thinking about this and our reporting and in our debating,

because it conveys the radical future imagined by this movement.

And I think white supremacy is just overly broad.

White supremacy is an ideology held in

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