some news that isn't new: violent white supremacists *still* aren't "lone wolves"
a recent racially-motivated attacker in Turkey directly referred to last year's Jacksonville murders, but most media outlets continue minimizing the networked nature of white supremacy
Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation!
Some of these posts will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. This is a follow-up to a story from last year, both part of my effort to record and reflect on the ways our nation’s story is being told. [Cover image: a 1951 Ku Klux Klan meeting in South Carolina, courtesy of KulturCritic.]
This Monday marks the one-year anniversary of what is now commonly referred to in discussions of mass shootings, especially racially-motivated ones, as the Jacksonville murders. It hurts to do a Google search and see how it pops up.
This story draws attention to the connection between that white supremacist attack in Jacksonville and a very recent one in Eskişehir, Turkey. The ADL published a solid article showing the Eskişehir attacker’s admiration for the Jacksonville shooter—here I want to briefly revisit the problem with how local law enforcement described the Jacksonville shooter and note that inadequate descriptions of the Eskişehir attacker’s motivation continued entering the public narrative even as a more definitive understanding became public record. In both cases, explanations for the public downplayed the networked nature of white supremacy. At a time when it is essential to understand the way extremism and white supremacy spread, especially through shared texts, the lack of insight and accuracy in some of our media organizations is dangerous.
last August in Jacksonville
For readers who don’t know what happened here last year, on Saturday, August 26th, 2023 a white man in his early twenties drove into Jacksonville from neighboring Orange Park and murdered three people he had never met. The victims were Jarrald Gallion, AJ Laguerre, Jr., and Angela Carr. The killer, Ryan Palmeter, hated them only for being Black. After apparently being scared off at Edward Waters University, our HBCU, he took an AR-15 decorated with swastikas to the Dollar General store in the New Town Success Zone, entered the store, and shot them. As has become commonplace in these tragedies, the murderer also killed himself and left a manifesto about his racism and his influences.
The day it happened, I wrote a story about my concerns regarding the problematic language used to describe the gunman—and therefore the nature of the crime itself—by Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters in a press conference shortly afterwards. Please read that story for fuller context and a discussion of Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home, where she explains how the American white supremacist “leaderless resistance” movement developed after the war in Vietnam.
As I noted last year, Sheriff Waters made an unhelpful and unrealistic set of claims. He said, “There is absolutely no evidence that the shooter is part of any large group. We know that he acted completely alone,” and then he described the shooter’s ideas as a “personal ideology.”
Essentially, we saw the sheriff assure the community he’s supposed to help protect that the threat had been contained by the shooter’s suicide. But that kind of illusory short-term solution only allows the problem of white supremacist violence to metastasize in the hands of these single-person cells, or radicalized actors who are very much a part of a larger “movement” whether or not they interact with others of the same mindset.
That was on August 26, 2023. The shooter’s manifesto was released in January of 2024, unsurprisingly revealing admiration for white supremacist murderers such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and, most particularly, Christchurch mosque murderer Brenton Tarrant. At the time of their own crimes, these men were also described by many in law enforcement, the media, and the public as “lone wolves” because they were not card-carrying members of white supremacist or nationalist organizations.
The insufficiency of the term is remarkable considering that frequent copying of manifestos, decades-long fandom surrounding race-war fantasy books like The Turner Diaries and Siege, and shared vocabulary drawn from extremist theories such as the Great Replacement have more than demonstrated that the circulation of influential texts happens without in-person or even online group membership. Palmeter’s manifesto quotes phrases showing his familiarity with a variety of white supremacist texts ranging from racial violence acronyms like TND (“total **** death”) and memes co-opted by the far right like “White Boy Summer” to celebrated details from core movement texts like The Turner Diaries’ “Day of the Rope,” a day when whites not sufficiently loyal to white supremacy are hanged.
Understanding the existence and transmission of this imagined community is essential—by using the word “imagined” here, I am not suggesting that white supremacists are not a very real presence. The term comes from Benedict Andersen’s influential analysis of the shared discourse—established in large part through print media and now through other modes such as the internet—that creates a sense of community and nation even among people who never interact. The distance in time and space between members of the same community is emphasized by what happened two weeks ago in Turkey.
this August in Eskişehir
On August 12, 2024—almost a year after the Jacksonville murders—an 18-year-old Turkish man stabbed five people in the city of Eskişehir. He was immobilized before he was able to kill anyone, but some of the injuries were serious. The manifesto posted by Arda Kucukyetim on Telegram earlier that day revealed not only his intent to kill Jewish people, but also his immersion in the manifestos of other white supremacist, antisemitic, and anti-government killers.
The ADL’s Center on Extremism report shows that the term “lone wolf” was claimed by the attacker himself, as he
expressed admiration for other lone wolf far-right mass killers including the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, who killed over 70 people, the shooter in the 2019 mosque attacks in New Zealand who gunned down 50 people, and the Jacksonville gunman who killed three at a store in 2023.
In spite of Kucukyetim’s own choice to use the term, the rest of his 16-page manifesto—“The Mass Cleaner Handbook”—and his actions show that he was not in fact a “lone” actor in the sense that matters. All of his hateful and paranoid ideas are received and derived from others operating within the same mental—or “imagined”—global community. The killers he idolizes were not truly lone wolves either, but people operating very much in the service of a movement, carrying out a mission outlined through decades of white supremacist texts. Further, he told police that he had been talking to someone in Europe about his plans.
Turkiye Today has posted a few stories tracking the investigation. This excerpt shows the difficulty reconciling the vision of someone being a lone wolf and being part of a larger movement that spreads through the internet:
The attack in Eskisehir is not an isolated incident but rather part of a larger, disturbing trend. The 18-year-old was influenced by far-right groups in the U.S. and Europe. These groups have become increasingly adept at using the internet to target and manipulate young people, particularly in countries like Türkiye, where there are significant immigrant populations.
This attack has exposed a new threat in Türkiye – the rise of lone-wolf extremism influenced by global far-right ideologies. As these groups continue to spread their toxic rhetoric online, the risk of similar attacks increases.
This is the best news article I’ve found about the event. But I think the language in the quotation above helps to highlight a conceptual problem: “lone-wolf extremism influenced by global far-right ideologies.” I would rephrase this to say that the influential ideology is the connecting fabric of what has now coalesced into a global community—and the attacker is part of that group. That’s how this works now. Sometimes the media’s attachment to the idea of formal membership can stand in the way of discussing the other ways white supremacists, accelerationists, ethno-nationalists, etc. “belong” to a common cause.
In contrast to the ADL analysis and the developing story fromTurkiye Today, the incident is mentioned only briefly in various major American outlets that do not mention the manifesto or connections to any of these well-known white supremacist murderers and texts, even when the information was released before their stories were posted. ABC News described the stabbings as “random” and said the perpetrator was “influenced by a video game.” Similar accounts are posted by MSN, AP News, and CBS News. According to Reuters’ brief coverage, the Turkish news outlet Anadolu also stated that a video game influenced the attacker but did not name their source.
The video game may be one of his influences, in terms of his approach and vision for the attack, but the video game is not why he did this. Media outlets that continue to mention the video game without providing better information create the same kind of problem Jacksonville Sheriff Waters created by suggesting that this kind of attack is safely understood as, essentially, a weird personal problem rather than the result of radicalization through repeated exposure to shared texts pushing a complex of false narratives about race, religion, nationality, and government.
Groups—from the many independent “active clubs” forming around the country, to more centralized, high profile violent groups like Proud Boys, and even to more publicly accepted groups putting their members on your local school board like Moms For Liberty—are important aspects of any discussion of white supremacist ideology. But when a white supremacist, an antisemite, or another extremist is not expressly affiliated with a group in the conventional sense, we gain no understanding by calling that person a lone wolf. The phrase is likely to obscure what’s happening and suggest that the person’s actions are more or less a one-off that probably could not have been predicted or prevented. More important than each person’s circle of associates, more important than the activities they can be seen participating in, we need to tell the public how an extremist has engaged with a network of ideas.
Of course people who recognize this problem are already working on it day and night, but the general public should also begin to ask the question. Sheriff T.K. Waters is not a high-profile national figure—but even national politics begin at the local level, and our elected officials ought not to say such ignorant things. On the other end of the visibility spectrum, mainstream national outlets should not post short blurbs about extremist violence suggesting more that the problem was about someone being influenced by a video game (a game that isn’t even worth naming or describing in most of the stories I’ve seen) rather than by the deeply intertextual web of extremist propaganda, models, manifestos, fiction, and memes.
The Dollar General shooting is a local tragedy to those of us in Jacksonville, but it is also an event that helps us understand more about American and even global white supremacy. As the one-year anniversary hits, I hope people will push back against those in the community or in the media who may reinvigorate the lone wolf narrative.
It doesn’t matter whether the phrase is spoken from ignorance or from a desire to obscure the many ways white supremacist violence is catalyzed. Like all the other false narratives that minimize the extent and the mechanism of 21st-century racism, it should be resisted and corrected.