This isn’t easy reading, but it’s important. In “The Making of an American Terrorist,” New Republic writer Amanda Robb interviews and reports on Robert Dear, who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic and killed three people in November 2015.
Dear is white, poor, middle-aged, Christian, and mentally ill. He lived in an RV in a rural part of Colorado. He watched a lot of right-wing TV and read a lot of right-wing websites. What makes this article so scary is that there are a lot of Robert Dears in America.
Excerpt
It would be easy to dismiss Dear as an unstable man who was driven by his mental illness rather than an organized ideology. After his arrest, psychiatrists diagnosed him with a “delusional disorder, persecutory type.” But Dear’s tendency toward violence was shaped and steered by outside forces every bit as much as the foreign terrorists we have come to fear.
Here’s the article: http://j.mp/2hlqARG (via Pocket). You can also find this article in this week’s Iserotope Extras, a weekly email digest that includes my favorite articles about race, education, and culture. Feel free to subscribe!