So, for example, if a cop guns down another black youth sleeping in his car, people can murmur “bad apple” all they want, but it’s a stochastic bad apple, right? I mean, “bad apple” is just polite speech for “lone wolf.” That cop is both a single person and the trigger finger of a broadly entrenched and disseminated worldview, an individual expression of structural force. But that leaves us with the task of understanding where that structural force comes from. We can’t simply trace things to some other bad apple, some demagogue spouting racist bullshit; that just leaves us adrift in the endless chain of ideas, dealing with one apple (or not) as another rolls into place. White supremacy, because that is what we are really talking about in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Vallejo, California, is itself not simply an idea but a self-replicating power structure, the ongoing dispossession and domination of some by others, a dis

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere. … A “civilian” Kalashnikov can easily be modified into a weapon that would blast a deer to smithereens. That’s illegal, of course, and unsportsmanlike. I have heard the asymmetry rationalized thus: deer can’t shoot back. Neither can adolescents in a movie theater, of course. … As for America, we have a way of plunging into wars we weary of and abandon after a few years and a few thousand casualties, having forgotten what our object was; these wars demonstrate an overwhelming power to destroy without any comparable regard to life and liberty, to the responsibilities of power, that would be consistent with maintaining our good name. We throw away our status in the world at the urging of those who think it has nothing to do with our laws and institutions, impressed by the zeal of those supernumeraries who are convinced that it all comes down to shock and awe and boots on the ground. This notion of glory explains, I suppose, some part of the fantasizing, the make-believe wars against make-believe enemies, and a great many of the very real Kalashnikovs.