Monitor: US Comment on the Internet's Influence Following Benjamin Smit H's Shooting Spree All the News of the World

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AFTER SMITH'S horrifying shooting spree, Americans are traumatized once again by racist violence. Blame it on Hale. Yes, Smith did the shooting. And there will be those who want to solely blame the actual killer, as though he were some meteor falling from the sky and not infected by the hatred around him. But Smith's sick story reads like a typical case history of the alienated American white male who's in trouble with the law and going nowhere. He meets a guru - in this case the race-baiting Hale - and devotes himself to a cause he believes gives meaning to his life: racial identity. And when the cause inevitably fails to pacify his inner demons, he explodes. Hale's probably …