Attention to the Unseen

Splinter reports: President Donald Trump is visiting Dayton and El Paso today in the wake of two mass shootings that left 31 people dead and dozens more injured—despite calls from Texas officials to stay away while people mourn. In the days after the shooting, the city of El Paso resoundingly rejected President Donald Trump’s plans to visit them. On Tuesday, El Paso City Council members expressed disagreement with Trump’s planned visit Wednesday, emphasizing his campaign still owes the city more…

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Pew Research Center reports: Most Americans continue to say that it would be “too risky” to give the nation’s presidents more power, but the share expressing this opinion has declined since last year, with most of the change coming among Republicans. Currently, 66% of the public says “it would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems.” About three-in-ten adults (29%) offer the contrasting opinion that “problems could be dealt…

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Jonathan Lis writes: A run on the pound was once the kind of event that troubled a prime minister. If it was shown to be the direct result of a policy the prime minister refused to change, it might even have unseated them. No longer. Now a Conservative government’s central policy will not just crash the pound, but also end Britain’s manufacturing and agriculture overnight and block half the country’s transportation of food and medicines – and it shows no…

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Bloomberg reports: After two gruesome mass shootings in a 24-hour span, some Republicans are raising alarms that their opposition to new firearm limits is making the party toxic to the suburban women and college graduates who will shape the 2020 election. “Republicans are headed for extinction in the suburbs if they don’t distance themselves from the NRA. The GOP needs to put forth solutions to help eradicate the gun violence epidemic,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and oil-and-gas executive…

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Rosa Schwartzburg writes: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Those were the words that appeared in a manifesto published shortly before the deadly shooting in El Paso on Saturday. More than half of so-called “alt-right killers” are motivated by the “white replacement” theory, which refers to the belief that white people will be systematically replaced by black and brown migrants. The killer in El Paso, who law enforcement believes authored the memo, is apparently no…

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Benedict Carey reports: People who blame mass shootings on “the mentally ill” are usually reasoning backward from the act itself: the person just shot 20 unarmed strangers, so he must be “crazy.” In fact, scientists find that only a small fraction of people with persistent mental distress are more likely than average to commit violent acts: patients with paranoid schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusional thinking and often so-called command hallucinations — frightening voices identifying threats where none exist. People…

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Gordon G. Chang writes: Defying stern warnings from both the local government and Beijing, people in seven districts in Hong Kong—most notably teachers, airport workers, and civil servants—participated in a general strike Monday, shutting down portions of the territory. For instance, more than a hundred flights were cancelled. The strike followed weeks of sometimes violent protests in the territory, a semi-autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. Youthful demonstrators over the weekend surrounded and attacked police stations, and enraged…

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Kathleen Belew writes: Like a number of recent mass shootings, the one in El Paso on Saturday came with a manifesto. While authorities are still working to verify that this document explicitly was indeed written by the attacker, the evidence seems clear: It was posted to 8Chan minutes before the attack, by someone with the same name. By manifesto, I mean a document laying out political and ideological reasons for the violence and connecting it to other acts of violence….

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Ali H. Soufan writes: When a young Muslim man, self-radicalized online, kills in the name of Islamist ideology, we have no trouble calling him a terrorist and connecting him with groups like ISIS. When a young white man, similarly self-radicalized, kills in the name of racist ideology — even when he publishes a manifesto to that effect — we tend to call him disturbed. We speak about him as a troubled loner, rather than a member of a wider network….

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