Another week, another murder committed by a right wing eliminationist.
For those who haven’t heard, yesterday an eighty eight year old racist walked into the District of Columbia’s Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire on the security guard who let him in, Stephen T. Johns.
The shooter, James von Brunn, was immediately brought down by two other security guards who returned fire, critically injuring him. He was subsequently hospitalized and charged with murder. von Brunn, who has a criminal record, has previously authored white supremacist and anti-Semitic drivel.
He’s the kind of person that local author David Neiwert writes extensively about in his new book, The Eliminationists (How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right). Neiwert defines eliminationism as “a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side; either thorugh suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination.”
The murders of Stephen Johns and George Tiller clearly demonstrate that right wing eliminationism is a threat to public safety and the common good. It’s time we took action against those who enable this cancer on our society before it gets out of control. Nothing less than human lives are at stake.