What They *Actually* Believe is Irrelevant

Bart Bonikowski on white supremacy in the Harvard Gazette:​​

"GAZETTE: How much of this is truly organic, how much is a byproduct of social media amplification, and how much is an elaborate trolling of so-called political correctness, the kind of thing encouraged in online communities like 4chan or Reddit? Is there any way to know?

BONIKOWSKI: It’s hard to know how to draw that distinction. Even if some of it is performative, it has very concrete consequences, as shown by the violence and the killing that occurred. ... So the question of how dearly they hold these views, I’m not sure that’s so relevant. In some ways, we could ask the same question about Nazis in the 1930s. How many of them really believed in the ideology, how many of them joined because their friends joined, how many of them were doing it to belong to some sort of community? All of these are interesting pathways from an academic standpoint, but at the end of the day, the movement committed unspeakable atrocities and embroiled the world in a massive war. Here too, there are many pathways toward social-movement mobilization that sociologists have documented, but what matters more in this case are the consequences."