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What did the US do when Forbes‘ J.J. MacNab revealed on Twitter that the Facebook page of the man (37-year-old Matthew Riehl) police identified as a suspect in a Denver shooting that killed one cop, injured four cops, and injured two civilians? Not much. It seems irrelevant that Rielhl appeared to be a white nationalist. The press has instead emphasized the suspect’s service in Iraq. This emphasis, of course, signals “mental illness” to a public looking for an explanation, a motive. And mental illness is something we in the US just can’t do a damn thing about. Getting shot by a mentally ill person is the same as being struck by a bolt of lightning. As to why this mentally ill person had enough ammo to fire over 100 rounds at the police and the public—pay that no mind.

The post on the suspect’s Facebook page, reports CNN, contained “rambling, nonsensical messages…” Someone from the university he once attended said that things he posted were “outrageous, vulgar and alarming.” He also harassed police officers about dumb shit. CNN, Fox News, Seattle Times and New York Times failed to point this out, which Newsweek at least mentioned:

The [suspect’s] page contained images of Pepe the Frog, a character that has been adopted as a mascot by the alt-right, a loose knit group of nationalists, white nationalists, misogynists, and conspiracy theorists. The movement was behind a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year that left one person dead and several seriously injured.

The general silence about the suspect’s possible white nationalist ties should deeply worry all thinking citizens. We are really playing with fire now.

Last week, a young man charged with killing his girlfriend’s parents (Scott Fricker and Buckley Kuhn-Fricker) was reported to be a neo-Nazi. Indeed, the police believe that he shot his girlfriend’s parents because they wanted their daughter to break with the neo-Nazi. And the white male who shot and killed two people of color (Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez) at a New Mexico high school on December 7 was also a pro-Trump neo-Nazi.

Again, imagine if these men had not been white but immigrants and Muslims? The volume on these stories would have been turned up to full blast. The fact that we are willing to make a hell of a lot of noise about Islamic terrorists and to be hush-hush about white terrorists shows Trump has won this game. Indeed, all of the nonsense he says about fake news is doubly empty. It’s empty because, one, he and his communications department are as fake as fake news can get and, two, CNN, CBS, and ABC refuse to address or expose the real (not fake) danger of his white nationalist following. The US has a white supremacist president. The neo-Nazis know this. They know exactly what the Muslim ban means.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...