About halfway through Monday's broadcast of the PBS News Hour, I was fascinated to see that one of the speakers presented as an expert on mass violence was none other than an intellectual historian, a University of Chicago professor named Kathleen Belew. Belew has just published a book tracing the evolution of white supremacy in America from the days of its appearance on the Internet in the 1980s up to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
What really drew my attention was how Belew situated her research within present day debates concerning the causes and nature of mass shootings. Clearly there is a growing disposition among some to move public discourse away from psychological arguments about “lone wolves” to one that sees them as part of a more politically conscious and deeply orchestrated movement. Professor Belew is in that camp.
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