Although she describes the Holocaust Museum shooter as an “outlier,” New York Times blogger Judith Warner says James von Brunn “has to be viewed as an extreme manifestation of a moment when racist, anti-Semitic agitation is rapidly percolating. White supremacist groups are vastly expanding. And right-wing TV rhetoric, thoughtless in its cruelty and ratings-hungry demagoguery, is helping feed the paranoia and rage that for some Americans now bubbles just beneath the surface.”
She says hate group membership spiked after Barack Obama's election. Warner writes, “As the former Klansman and Louisiana state representative David Duke predicted last June, the face of the first black man in the White House was a ‘visual aid’ for white supremacists, spurring a rapid rise in recruitment and radicalization.” And she notes that the Department of Homeland Security had reported in April that Obama’s election was being used by extremists “to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.”