Alexandros Paporakis was one jammed gun away from a massacre. Palatine, Illinois, police allege that Paporakis had plotted a “mass shooting of Indian people” at a Hindu temple in nearby Aurora. He had driven there with an AR-style rifle, 300 rounds of ammo, body armor, gasoline cans, and “an assortment of swastikas.” But the rifle jammed, so the 19-year-old drove back to his mother’s house to fix the problem. In the course of doing so, he disclosed his plan to a colleague, who told the police.
Paporakis was an evidently disturbed young man. Officers recovered a manifesto that, local news reported, “expressed words of hate, violence, superior race and mass shooting of Indian people. His hatred was against Jewish people, African Americans, Indians, & ‘non-white’ people.” He was also in treatment for ADHD, depression, and anxiety, and “receives hormone injections for gender transition.”
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The attempted attack is part of a broader pattern: internet-radicalized, lone-wolf shooters, often young men, plotting or carrying out bias-motivated attacks. The archetype is increasingly the face of twenty-first-century domestic terror. But the effective check against it remains the same as ever: zero tolerance, whether the behavior is based on hate or otherwise.
Examples of the phenomenon keep mounting. In May, 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez shot and killed three people at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The pair had allegedly met online. In September, the FBI foiled a plot by 21-year-old Jonathan Kramer to attack synagogues in Pittsburgh in the name of ISIS. In March, 18-year-old Nikita Casap received a life sentence for murdering his parents to get money to assassinate President Donald Trump in a plot to “save the white race.”
These crimes each had explicitly bigoted motivations. But just as important is the open-ended and undirected hatred that seems to fuel many of the perpetrators. Paporakis set out to kill Hindus at worship but seems to have harbored strong dislike for other groups, too. His alleged “fantasies of mass murder” imply a desire to destroy everything he can see. There is some overlap, one suspects, with so-called “nihilistic violent extremist” movements, which engage in criminal acts like sextortion, and the inducement to suicide merely for what some see as the fun of it.
These crimes are in part the product of digital discourse. Many of these young men mix their preexisting dysfunction with a toxic stew of the most heinous and hateful ideas, now all readily available online. Historically, bias-motivated killers would have to seek out others to expand or validate their anti-Indian, anti-Muslim, or anti-Semitic views. Today’s equivalents can find it ready and waiting online, and in more potent form than has previously been available.
At the same time, these crimes are driven by a desire to contribute to that discourse. In his manifesto, Paporakis styled himself the “Aurora shooter,” an attempt to brand himself for the peers who celebrate mass murderers like the Christchurch shooter. The constant escalation of hatred is part of a reasoning loop that rewards extremism—and prizes actions over words.
More alarmingly, it is possible that this discourse shapes the general public’s view. One recent study found that Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—another ideologically motivated lone-wolf attack—caused an increase in support for partisan violence among Democrats. Paporakis perhaps might not have been persuaded to the same degree. But the cumulative effect of all these actions is to normalize violence as a means of political expression.
The only adequate response is to reject such expressions utterly. It doesn’t matter who the target is. It doesn’t matter what merit some half-hearted ideological sympathizer might find in the shooter’s motives. Ideological violence must simply never be tolerated.
This is true as much of bias-motivated violence as it is of political violence. As I argued several years ago, hate crimes are particularly heinous because they offend against public decency. Norms of minimal toleration regardless of difference—and, specifically, of not converting our ideas into violent actions—are a necessary precondition of a functioning democratic polity. One of the blessings of American liberty is the freedom to worship—as a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or otherwise—even as we disagree fiercely over the broad principles implicated in that worship.
Crimes like Paporakis’s are an offense against the social fabric. We should treat them the same way we treat other such offenses—with zero tolerance.