The Jacksonville Killer Wanted Everyone to Know His Message of Hate

He didn’t want to merely murder people; he wanted to do so with the attention of the world.

Much is already known about the gunman who killed three Black customers at a Dollar General shop in Jacksonville, Florida, yesterday. He was in possession of an AR-15-style weapon and a handgun; he left manifestos about his hatred toward African Americans; he was wearing a tactical-style uniform, as if going to war. There are still questions about how he acquired the guns, his mental state, and whether he had accomplices. But the basic storyline is written. He made it easy. He wanted us to know.

His actions yesterday were not just a hate crime. They were a performance for all the world to see. This is the age of mass shooting as production. And we misunderstand what is happening if we see this as a play with only one act at a time.

At the powerful post-shooting press conference yesterday, Sheriff T. K. Waters was clear, sharing as much information as was readily available. He did not sanitize, quoting the N-word directly from the manifesto, the shock of hearing the word putting to rest such euphemisms as racially motivated or tinged.

Waters plainly wanted to calm the public, the Black public, by stating that the gunman “acted completely alone,” as if to assure the community that it was no longer under threat. His statement that “there is absolutely no evidence that the shooter is part of any large group” may technically be true but is a false narrative. White supremacists, and in particular neo-Nazis, are not acting in isolation, and they like to put on a show.

Right-wing violence is done by individuals, but they are organizing and learning from an online apparatus as well as the actions of previous like-minded killers. Mass killings from the past, in New Zealand or Norway or South Carolina, are studied and replicated, each feeding off the others. Like foreign terror groups, these men seek to use violence as a way to attract attention to their cause. “The culture of martyrdom and insurgency within groups like the Taliban and ISIS is something to admire and reproduce in the neo-Nazi terror movement,” a 2019 online poster advocated on a neo-Nazi site. These killings are done to amplify that movement’s perverse narrative of America—that white people are still in charge and that many of them are willing to kill to prove it, and they do so publicly to terrorize.

In an age of social media and the dark web, members of this sect find one another on platforms that welcome them. The public display of hate is part of the act. In recent years in Jacksonville, and in Florida more generally, the neo-Nazi movement has grown. Earlier this year, neo-Nazis projected anti-Semitic messages on buildings—look at us!—throughout the state. These were linked to a Jacksonville-based neo-Nazi group called National Socialist Florida (NSF). We do not yet know if the Jacksonville shooter had any knowledge of or ties to that group, but a federal civil-rights investigation will surely look into that question.

According to information released at yesterday’s press conference, before he pulled the trigger, the gunman called his father. He directed him to look at his computer, where he had left his manifestos, the playbill of right-wing terror. He wanted to make sure his intentions were known. Hate-filled screeds had been written to his parents, law enforcement, and the media; he was leaving nothing unsaid.

A picture posted by the police shows one firearm with swastikas drawn on it, as if it had to be branded not simply as a gun but as a Nazi one. We get the message.

The Jacksonville killer, though, wasn’t just killing for his own and neo-Nazi branding. His other audience was the Black community, there and throughout the nation. After all, he was first spotted earlier in the day not at the store but at Edward Waters University, Florida’s oldest historically Black university. In a state where Governor Ron DeSantis has fought the culture wars around African American studies, Edward Waters was founded in 1866 by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for freed Black people and their children. Every HBCU in America—as well as their students and the students’ parents—will feel vulnerable, especially after last year’s slate of bomb threats against them. An on-campus security officer had approached the Jacksonville gunman as he was putting on his tactical gear and asked him to leave. The killer didn’t want a confrontation; he wanted a hunt. The Dollar General store, with its unprotected customers, is down the street.

The Saturday shooting occurred on the fifth anniversary of the Jacksonville Landing mass shooting—a fact the killer was apparently aware of. It also occurred on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, at the civil-rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Whether the killer knew this doesn’t really matter. African Americans do.

The Jacksonville shootings could have been worse. The gunman certainly had the ability to kill more. What he did do with chilling exactitude was carefully produce a day of violence by controlling the message and means. The public will talk of gun control and mental illness, but the story is also the story. And what we know for sure is that there will be more performances, with new actors and victims, over and over again, in large and small community venues, to continue this endless and outraging American tragedy. This play never ends.