Today is the twentieth anniversary of the day that two teen-agers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve of there fellow students and one teacher in Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado. The pair also injured 21 other people before their shooting spree came to an end. The pair also planted several bombs in and around the school. Some of the bombs were intended to kill their classmates and teachers, some were meant to divert emergency services so that they would have time to kill more people. Fortunately that part of the plan didn’t pan out, but the school shooting was enough of a shock that for years afterward the name of the town and school became a synonym for mass shootings and specifically shootings in schools.

At the time, the pair were depicted as the victims of bullying who might of been driven to their horrific crimes by video games or music. The truth is that they were deeply enmeshed in Nazi and white supremacist thinking. They weren’t so much the victims of bullying as they were fairly ordinary middle class white straight boys who had come to see a world that didn’t treat them as superior to people who weren’t white, male, and straight, as a form of bullying.

Yes, they were alt-right white supremacists. They weren’t poor, misunderstood victims. They were Nazis:

The day he attacked Columbine High School, Eric wore a shirt that read “Natural Selection.” Eric often wrote and spoke about survival of the fittest and natural selection. In his mind, this meant eliminating “unfit” people from the planet. This desire was similar to what Hitler and the Nazis sought to do.
In the fall of his senior year, Eric wrote a research paper on the Nazis. One of the themes he focused on was the Nazi goal of eliminating people who were deemed unfit for life. In his paper, Eric wrote about “the euthanasia program that led to the killing of approximately 100,000 lives that were ‘not worth living.’” He also wrote, “in Nazi Germany, all mentally disabled people or ‘incurable mental defectives’ were killed.” In addition, “Arithmetic was used to show how ‘wasteful’ the mentally challenged were and how much money could be saved by euthanasia.”
—Peter Langman, Ph.D., “Influences on the Ideology of Eric Harris” https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/harris_influences_ideology_1.2.pdf

In the months leading up to their crime, they scribbled swastikas and SS symbols in their journals. They praised Nazis, calling the Nazi annihilation of various ethnic groups, disabled people, on so on, as a smart and efficient way to improve society. They committed their crime on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday (and their journals indicated this was intentional), for goodness sake!

They were not victims. They were murderers.

They were not victims. They were domestic terrorists.

They were nor sweet innocent boys who were driven to commit their crimes. They were entitled man-babies who thought someone that freedom was a zero-sum game; that equality for others somehow took something from them that they thought rightfully was theirs.

They were precursors of the current alt-right adherents and apologists who have taken over the executive branch of government.

And we didn’t recognize the warning for what it was. Just as we continue to treat individual angry white men who burn down churches and go on shooting sprees as trouble individuals, instead of recognizing the terroristic fascist movement that it is.

The Columbine shooters were white supremacists. Their shooting was an attempt to enact a genocidal program similar to the Nazis. Don’t let anyone tell you different!