“Screw your optics.”

Those were among the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he attacked the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, according to the federal indictment against him.

These words were also a reflection of a debate that has split the white nationalist movement for years, but has rarely reached the general public’s eye. The reactions to Mr. Bowers’ final post reveal much about that movement’s direction since then.

The “optics debate” pits those who say they want to achieve a white-only or white-dominated nation through persuasion and politics against others — some calling themselves accelerationists — who want to start a race war as soon as possible.

To some of the former, the Tree of Life massacre was “strategically stupid,” as one put it in an audio blog.

For others, though, that last post became a meme. A search for Twitter posts including “screw your optics” reveals 42 of them in August alone — a full nine months after the phrase was coined — including Tweets dealing with white nationalism and mass killings, but also some broadly referencing U.S. or European politics, or topics as mundane as gardening and the decision to get contact lenses. A Google search, meanwhile, revealed at least 40 images captioned with some version of “screw your optics.”

The Tree of Life massacre didn’t end the “optics debate.” But it may have shifted the  balance as it reverberated through the increasingly networked white nationalist and supremacist movements in the U.S., Europe and the Australian subcontinent.

Some who study the white identity movement say that it continues to gain momentum and stridency, even as the media and many politicians decry violence perpetrated in its name at Tree of Life, Christchurch in New Zealand, El Paso, Texas, and elsewhere.

In the past year, “things have just gotten so much worse,” said John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State University who researches terrorism and violent extremism. Ethnic, racial and religious incitement “is insidious. It’s pervasive. And it seems to be becoming an attractive counterculture to an increasing number of young people.”

From ‘amnats’ to Atomwaffen

White supremacy today is “on the resurgence,” said Kathleen Blee, distinguished professor of sociology and dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. She traces the growth in the movement partially to the ease of participation through web forums and social media and in part to the election of President Barack Obama. “What propels white supremacy historically is threat,” she said. “The idea that the white race is imperiled by a black presidency. That threat started mobilizing people.”

White supremacy today is also distinguished by the prevalence of the “great replacement theory” — the idea that there is a plot, masterminded by Jews, to replace whites with other races. The theory has caught fire among white supremacists in the last decade or so, said Ms. Blee, and was referenced by name by the shooters in Christchurch, El Paso, and at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., near San Diego.

“There’s a clear structure to how this works, and what this ideology does is that it focuses attention on certain groups as the enemy and makes the issue seem very, very urgent,” she said. “That’s the fear part. The race war is going to start right now. The threat is immediate, urgent and that action can be taken. Bowers and many other people buy into that.”

What the FBI calls “racially motivated violent extremism” — including anti-Semitism and crime driven by bias related to gender identity — is on the rise nationally and locally, said John Pulcastro, a supervisory intelligence analyst with the bureau’s Pittsburgh office. He can’t quantify the prevalence of extremism, but said that the numbers of acts, tips and preventive interventions has risen, especially since 2017’s Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va.

“It’s a major focus of our intelligence unit right now and it’s a national threat priority for the FBI nationally as a whole,” said Mr. Pulcastro, who has spent 20 of his 30 years with the bureau working on extremism cases.

Optics — the way things look — may not have mattered to white nationalists a century ago, when the movement was epitomized by hooded Ku Klux Klan members and burning crosses. In 2017, though, initial images from Charlottesville conveyed a much different impression — clean-cut young men in polos and khakis, holding tiki torches. Advocates for “optics” won that day.

Only the next morning did the Nazi and Confederate flags appear, followed at the end by some very bad optics — video of a car driven by neo-Nazi James Fields plowing through counterprotesters and killing Heather D. Heyer, 32.

“After Charlottesville there was a huge debate about optics,” wrote one self-described American Nationalist, who communicated with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in September and October, and is profiled in a companion piece on this page. He characterized a divide between “pretenders who want to look tough wearing swastikas, and yell about killing people” and “actual White American Nationalists who disavow violence, promote change through policy, care about America, and refuse to dress up like some costumed freak to gain attention.”

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“[Racially motivated violent extremism] is a major focus of our intelligence unit right now and it’s a national threat priority for the FBI nationally as a whole.”

His side, he wrote, has “rules such as: If anyone tries to get you to do something illegal or tells you that they’re gonna do something illegal, that person gets cut off immediately and forever.”

Requests for comment from the other side of the optics debate resulted in long streams of mocking, often vulgar and sometimes threatening social media posts including references to shooting and raping journalists, pictures in which guns are pointed at the viewer and name-calling like “filthy dumb journo scum.”

In the days after the Tree of Life massacre, the New York-based Network Contagion Research Institute turned its computer analysis tools to the use of the word “optics” on Gab.com, on which Mr. Bowers posted. “Optics” was closely associated with “infight” and with these extremist terms:

• wn, short for white nationalism, or the desire for a “white homeland.”
• amnat, short for American nationalism, an avowedly non-racist reaction to globalism.
• civnat, a far-right term for moderate-to-conservative whites.
• Atomwaffen, a violent neo-Nazi clique.
• blackpill, a term for the act of pushing another person deep into nihilism.

Also associated closely with “optics” was the acronym gtkrwn — extremist code for “gas the kikes, race war now,” said Joel Finkelstein, the director of the NCRI, which uses technology to study racism and anti-Semitism.

“When [Bowers] is talking about optics and passing it off as bravado to the public,” said Mr. Finkelstein, “he’s telling his own community that, ‘we’re ready to have a coming out party, and this is it.’”

The FBI, said Mr. Pulcastro, urges the public to be alert to the provocative word “invasion” in reference to immigration, the term “blood and soil,” and the 14-word creed of white extremists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

According to Mr. Finkelstein, “screw your optics” put Mr. Bowers solidly into the pantheon of far-right accelerationists.

“Bowers is kind of a meme now,” he said. “He’s not just a guy. He’s a thing to do.”

‘Then we’ll have our way’

From the outside, it may seem ridiculous that slaughtering aging Jews at worship in Pittsburgh or Hispanic shoppers in El Paso could advance any cause. Some fringe figures, though, saw it as a win for the far side of the optics debate.

One Gab poster early this year called Mr. Bowers “a good person who snapped, because of all the Anti-White [stuff] going on,” according to the Tampa Bay Times. That post is reportedly attributed to Daniel McMahon, a Tampa-area man who frequently went by the name Jack Corbin online. Mr. Bowers repeatedly shared Jack Corbin posts before the Tree of Life massacre, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute.

In September, federal prosecutors in Charlottesville indicted Mr. McMahon, 31, for electronically intimidating an African American man into dropping a bid for a seat on that city’s council.

Screwing the optics makes perfect sense to some self-described accelerationists, who believe that provoking society and speeding its decline is the surest path to a white nation, said Peter Simi, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University in Irvine, Calif., and author of “American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate.”

The term “accelerationist” originally referred to people who believe that ever-speeding technological and social change can prompt painful — but ultimately desirable — change. In recent years, some on the right fringe have adopted the term.

The rightist accelerationist logic, Mr. Simi said, is that by repeatedly damaging the prevailing system, they “can get to this total collapse, ‘and then we’ll have our way.’”

Those accelerationists have gained urgency from anti-immigrant rhetoric in politics and the media, experts agreed.

“Their view is, we don’t need to just act, we need to act now, rather than later, because if we don’t act, our very way of life is at risk,” said Mr. Horgan. “We can’t wait because we are being invaded.”

Since Tree of Life, Poway and the Christchurch mosque massacre in New Zealand — before which the accused echoed “screw your optics” in his online posts — Mr. Simi has seen the emergence of a discussion thread more chilling than the optics conversation.

“I saw discussion that was very, kind of, strategic about how the person got radicalized, how they could have been more effective in terms of killing more people — this kind of after-incident assessment,” he said.

International nationalism

The Anti-Defamation League counted 18 known attacks or plots by white supremacists in the U.S. between Oct. 27 and mid-September. Several were anti-Semitic, including Poway, in which a 19-year-old, following a script chillingly reminiscent of Tree of Life, killed one and injured three before his gun jammed.

Bari Weiss, New York Times columnist and author of the recently released book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” still calls modern American Jews “the luckiest diaspora in Jewish history.” Compared to anti-Semitism in Europe, “the cancer here is at stage 1 rather than at stage 4,” she said. Ms. Weiss grew up in Squirrel Hill and celebrated her bat mitzvah at Tree of Life.

“In no way did I think that what happened in Pittsburgh would happen in America,” she said. “I thought that violent anti-Semitism was something that happened in other places.”

But white nationalism has become more overtly international.

“We had European white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, and American white supremacists marching in Poland,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL. “White supremacy is a global terror threat.”

Organizations on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly networked, according to an ADL report released in September.

Americans have attended far-right events and conferences in Poland and Scandinavia, the ADL and partner organizations reported. A few prominent figures from the movement even took up temporary residence in Hungary, where anti-immigrant Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has emerged as a hero to xenophobes. And U.S.-based groups like Women for Aryan Unity have established chapters in Europe.

On Oct. 9, the suspected gunman in the Yom Kippur synagogue attack in Halle, Germany, livestreamed the attack on the Amazon-owned Twitch platform, narrating his actions in English in an apparent attempt at maximizing exposure. The Halle gunman failed to enter the synagogue, and then killed two and injured two others nearby.

The video was removed quickly by Twitch, but had already been downloaded and copied to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by extremists.

Rich Lord: rlord@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1542. Staff writer Anya Sostek contributed..