If it takes a “village to raise a child,” it takes a very different kind of “village to raise a young racist terrorist, like Payton Gendron and others – and there are many – of like mind. In this village – and this village is more a metaphor than an actual place – are found Trump and Trumpists, Tucker Carlson and Fox, Repubicans, the Proud Boys and their like, social media platforms promoting racist hate and violence, gun manufacturers and lobbyists, more “Christians” than you would care to believe, angry white men of every class, jurists, like Samuel Alito, and, lest we conveniently forget, inaction by us – moderates, liberals, progressives, and people on the left.
To round things out though, I would include racialized capitalism, which is the fluid and embedded seedbed of the structures of racist inequality and exploitation and reactionary racist politics.
