The Synagogue Attack Stands Alone, but Experts Say Violent Rhetoric Is Spreading

PITTSBURGH — Mass shooters do not often end up on trial. Many are killed or take their own lives in their attacks, some leaving behind a manifesto explaining why they acted, others leaving a mystery.

But in a trial that ended Thursday with the imposition of a death sentence, scores of witnesses took turns dissecting the life and motivations of a middle-aged man who lived alone in a small apartment before carrying out the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history: the killing of 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018.

From the testimony of prominent psychiatrists and aging relatives emerged a portrait of the gunman, Robert Bowers, that was at once shocking and strangely familiar. It depicted an isolated, unhappy man who had grown obsessed with dark and deranged ideas, such as the notion that Jewish people were part of a conspiracy to destroy the white race.

“I see how the first time you hear it, it sounds pretty crazy,” Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist explained to the jury in testimony in early July. “But when you have seen this promoted for 20 years, 40 years, among thousands and thousands of people, in their books and the propaganda and online forums, it’s clear that these are subcultural beliefs.”

The defense lawyers argued that Bowers’ troubled childhood and mental illnesses had fueled bizarre, apocalyptic delusions. But Dietz and other experts who testified for the prosecution said the defense “simply mistook very ordinary widespread white separatist beliefs for delusions because they weren’t familiar with them.”

If the government’s argument ultimately convinced the jury, and brought some measure of relief to the people who sat in court just a few steps away from the man who killed their loved ones, it was an argument that experts say should give little comfort to anyone else.

In the online far-right fever swamps that have grown immensely since the synagogue massacre, the views Bowers expressed on social media five years ago would be “simply unremarkable,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people saying that stuff and even worse,” Segal said.

Other experts in threat assessment agreed there was very little about what Bowers appeared to believe that was exceptional.

The idea of the “great replacement” — that elites, and often specifically Jewish people, are bringing in darker-skinned immigrants to “replace” white Americans — has been echoed by other purveyors of violence but is also expressed routinely on right-wing websites. A more muted version of the “great replacement” theory was standard fare on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, which drew millions of viewers every night, and has even been espoused by members of Congress.

Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.com, a far-right social media platform where Bowers wrote and shared hundreds of virulently antisemitic posts, testified at the trial that there were about 800,000 accounts on the site in 2018. In a 2022 corporate filing, Gab reported having nearly 6 million accounts, although it was unclear how many were active.

“Technology has advanced in the last five years, and so there’s more ways of creating engagement over hatred of Jews or other communities,” Segal said.

There are now instruction manuals online for white supremacist would-be terrorists, he said, and propaganda videos telegraphing bigoted harassment or even violence to the widest possible audience, an avenue for self-promotion far beyond Bowers’ terse post on Gab before the shooting. Segal pointed out that the 19-year-old white man who shot and killed 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in 2022 — who had carved Robert Bowers’ name onto his gun — livestreamed the massacre.

In an online sea of hateful and violent rhetoric, it has become evermore challenging to spot the true threats. There are certain signals that threat-assessment experts look for, said Molly Amman, a former FBI profiler who is studying the Bowers case. These include, she said, a radicalized view of the danger posed by some group of outsiders, and “a sense that something is fundamentally changing,” that “what I’m doing is no longer enough.”

The psychiatrists and other experts who interviewed Bowers said in their testimony that he expressed this kind of visceral urgency to act, seeing it as a duty to protect his culture from invasion. But he said as much openly on Gab. Statements like this are all over the internet, and the notion that civilization is being pushed to the edge of collapse has become a standard trope of political and media rhetoric on the far right.

There is a combination of different factors that increase the chances someone will become a dangerous risk, said Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. It is a pattern apparent in other recent cases of violence — such as the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and the attack on Paul Pelosi last year — and it was also present in Bowers’ case.

He was an already volatile man, perhaps suffering from lifelong mental disorders. After the death of his grandfather and his one close friend, he was isolated and alone. He spent his days online, immersed in conspiracy, what Pape called “self-brainwashing.” And he became convinced that there was a threat manifesting, a “great replacement,” and that it was his duty to act.

Some of the factors that converged in his case are intensifying nationwide. Extremist content continues to mushroom online, while the U.S. surgeon general has warned of “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Men, in particular, have grown more socially detached.

Pape said it was too simplistic to declare that the growth of these trends means there will be more horrific tragedies.

But, he added, “we should prepare as if there will be more.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/us/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-antisemitism-bowers.html">The New York Times</a>.