Flera skjutna i synagoga i Pittsburgh, USA. 2018-10-27

According to former neighbors from when Bowers lived at a previous address, he had worked as a trucker, kept to himself, and would sometimes stay at home for days at a stretch.

Linda Lohr, a retired paralegal, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette she was shocked, saying that although he was quiet, he was also the kind of neighbor who would call to let her know if she left the garage door open.

Bowers has no known criminal record, according to the paper, but had on occasion had “contacts” with local police over noncriminal issues.

He was given a traffic citation in 2015 for operating a vehicle without registration plates, and was subject to a debt claim by Colonial Credit Corporation for $2,065 in 2005.

Neighbours speaking to US media describe Robert Bowers as "normal".

He was reportedly a truck driver, living in a flat in Baldwin, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

He kept to himself, and neighbours never saw him with visitors.

Neighbour Chris Hall told AP: "The most terrifying thing is just how normal he seemed."

He reportedly often visited a relative's home 10 minutes away, neighbours told the Washington Post. They said he may have been helping care for a disabled man there.

Robert Bowers had an active gun licence and owned 21 firearms, officials say.

"But Bowers targeted Tree of Life because of a deeper conspiratorial worldview that cast Jews as the most urgent threat to the white race. In his last Gab post and several others, as well as in his statements to authorities after being apprehended, it’s clear Bowers adheres to the antisemitic conspiracy called “white genocide.”

White genocide holds that forces — principally Jewish, often coded as “globalist” — are pursuing policies seeking to destroy the “white race” in their “traditional homelands” like Europe and the United States through the deliberate importation of non-white people. This is what the torch-bearing white supremacists who marched on the campus of the University of Virginia meant when they chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/...ters-posts-gab

White genocide includes immigration policy but also extends into the cultural realm. Adherents of the conspiracy view depictions of interracial relationships or positive representations of minority groups in media not only as lies but propaganda to convince viewers to acquiesce to “globalist” forces and become willing agents of their own demise. This cultural aspect of “white genocide” is buttressed by older antisemitic conspiracy theories that claim Jews control the mass media and Hollywood."

Neighbour Chris Hall told AP: "The most terrifying thing is just how normal he seemed."

Second, we should resist dismissing Bowers with the all-too-easy claim that he was “crazy.” Yes, Bowers did something evil and stupid. But Bowers’ underlying motive — fear of white race replacement — is not irrational or insane. It is a healthy reaction to objective facts. All white people have innate ethnocentric tendencies, wired deep in our brains. We love our own and we fear strangers. As diversity increases, all of us will bear increased psychic costs, even those who pursue wealth and status by selling out their own people in favor of foreigners.

Bowers and people like him may be nothing more than canaries in a coal mine: the first to sense the presence of a threat to the survival of us all. Bowers may have just been abnormally sensitive to the terrible psychic consequences of losing control of our society to aliens: stress, alienation, anger, hatred, rage, etc. This heightened sensitivity might also go along with a whole suite of other abnormal traits. But we dismiss people like Bowers at our own risk. For in the end, all of us will feel the same effects — unless we heed the warning signs and turn back the rising tide of color.