Hi, everybody. Welcome to the McCrack podcast. I'm Jared Yates Sexton. Nick Hausman is taking the day off, so I am here manning the store.

We have a long-awaited interview coming up later in the show with Ruth Bengayette, the author of Strongman

Mussolini to the present. I urge you to stick around for that. Unfortunately, before we get to that

interview, we have to talk about some really serious stuff that has transpired over the past few days.

On Saturday, as you are all aware, a radicalized gunman walked into the top supermarket in Buffalo,

New York, carrying a semi-automatic rifle, scrawled in racist slurs,

and shot 13 people, killed 10. And in the wake of this absolutely terrible tragedy, a manifesto was discovered,

surprise, surprise, that espoused white supremacist conspiracy theories.

This is something that Nick and I spend a lot of time not just studying, but warning about how the fearmongering among right-wing pundits, personalities, and politicians inevitably leads to this type of violence and how this environment of conspiracy

theories inevitably radicalizes people to the point of carrying out violence.

I heard about this shooting and was disgusted by it, but also frustrated by just the emerging

story of it all, this cycle that we've all now lived through so many damn times.

One of these domestic terrorists will shoot up a public location, take the lives of people needlessly.

There will be a few days of coverage.

We'll see the same stories over the next few days.

We'll hear about the community's healing while all of these corporate networks just

sort of glom onto to them and shake their

heads and perform this sort of public mourning and wrestling with the issue without actually

talking about what's going on and then it'll happen again and to look around over the past few days,

not only is it going to happen again, it already happened.

We've already seen other shootings around the country

in the wake of this shooting.

...