The Florida Shooter's Ties to White Supremacy Shouldn't Surprise Anyone [Updating]

In the days following each successive mass shooting that generates another flurry of lawmakers' thoughts and prayers, one of the most difficult processes is the one in which we look back on what happened and identify each inflection point at which the tragedy could have been prevented. On Wednesday, we learned that the perpetrator of the Parkland shooting showed pictures of his guns to others, and was abusive to women, and posted videos on social media about killing animals. Nikolas Cruz's "jokes" about knowing the school's layout well enough to find hiding students in the event of a school shooting, it seems, were actually warnings that everyone missed.

On Thursday, we learned of another characteristic that Cruz shares with recent mass murderers: He has close and recent ties to a white supremacist group. His YouTube comment history is peppered with racist and Islamophobic slurs, and as reported by the Anti-Defamation League, Cruz allegedly participated in paramilitary training exercises with the Republic of Florida, which lists the creation of a "white ethnostate" among its chief objectives. The group even claimed that it provided Cruz with a gun, and while RoF "captain" Jordan Jereb told The Daily Beast that the weapon was not the one used in the shooting—and that Cruz did not act at the group's request—he didn't sound too broken up about what happened, either.

“There’s a very real sense of feminism being a cancer. That could’ve played into what he did, but we have female members of RoF,” Jereb said, adding that “we’re not a big fan of Jews. I think there were a lot of Jews at the school that might have been messing with him.”

Jereb continued:

“I’m not trying to glorify it, but he was pretty efficient in what he did... He probably used that training to do what he did yesterday. Nobody I know told him to do that, he just freaked out.”

The Republic of Florida is not the only white supremacist movement with which Cruz allegedly associated himself. A now-deleted Instagram account purportedly belonging to Cruz included, among images of guns and graphic depictions of dead animals, a profile picture of him wearing a red "Make America Great Again" hat.

Arguing about whether Donald Trump (or anyone or anything else) "contributed to" or "precipitated" a shooting (or any other event for which we seek to attribute blame) is kind of a pointless exercise in semantics. The concept of fault is a value judgment, not an objective assessment, and responsibility exists in the eye of the beholder. Those who claim an ability to identify a single, definitive causal relationship almost always arrive at a conclusion that aligns nicely with their existing biases.

That said, it's hard not to notice that the number of violent crimes motivated by animus—from Dylann Roof to James Jackson to Adam Purinton to Jeremy Christian—has been on the rise of late. And it is difficult to deny that the president, despite never openly embracing the hate groups who chant his name and wear his hat, keeps finding reasons not to disavow them, either.

After Charlottesville, I wrote that although white supremacists and their ilk have always existed among us, a patchwork set of social mores, until recently, did a decent job of marginalizing those people—or, at the very least, encouraging them to keep quiet. This resurgence of the malevolent forces that Donald Trump rode all the way to the White House might prove to be more harmful than any policy decision he makes while in office. Sometimes, the greatest dangers are those that have been around the entire time, waiting for someone who looks like a hero.

UPDATE: In response to several media reports, including one in which several of Cruz's classmates told ABC News that they had seen him march with RoF, Leon County law enforcement officials stated to the Tallahassee Democrat that they have yet to verify the claims Jereb made to ABC, the Anti-Defamation League, and other outlets. On Gab, a social network frequented by white supremacists, Jereb has asserted that a lack of sleep caused him to misidentify Cruz when those outlets asked him for comment.