Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee expressed that Big Mike “could have avoided that if he’d have behaved like something other than a thug.” He wasn’t the only one who shared this sentiment. Many political officials and news correspondents proclaimed that Big Mike fell to his demise because of his thugary; that Trayvon Martin was hunted down at the age of 17 by a wanna-be cop because of his thug-like attire (i.e. hoodie); that Jordan Davis was slain at the age of 17 because of his loud “thug music”; that people who are tired of their voices being neglected, and their bodies treated as shooting range targets are thugs because they choose to use the only language the country understands.

Thug became synonymous with Black. Black synonymous with threat. So thug became synonymous with me.

There are different definitions and interpretations of what a thug is. Many believe a thug to be a gangster. A hoodlum. A violent person engaged in criminal activity. This individual’s uniform is believed to consist of sagged pants, a dark hoodie, and black skin. Thugs are thought to cause trouble as if trouble is a distant family member whose genes were inherited. A thug’s life seems to be engulfed in the desire to cause harm and to flex cold-heartedness. Tupac would disagree with this. Tupac Shakur believed a thug’s life was filled with hatred that was bottle-fed to them as infants. And what those li’l ones grew up to be was what society molded them to be … The Hatred U Give Li’l Infants F—s Everyone (THUG LIFE).

Pac’s words remind me of when James Baldwin compelled White folks to figure out why they invented the negro. Why do White supremacist power structures feed black bodies, resulting in Black folks internalizing that hatred and devastating our own being? Why do White supremacist power structures kill Black people twice? The first murder physically. The second murder socially. When Botham Jean was murdered in his home by an officer in 2018, why was the weed found in his home the highlight, and not the search warrant used to justify his death? Why was Korryn Gaines killed at 23 years old because officers were indifferent about her mental illness? Why was Allen Fanning, from Englewood, killed by police at 18 years old, but Dylann Roof was arrested and taken to Burger King after murdering nine loving people?

We shouldn’t die because of smoking weed. We shouldn’t die because of our need to feel the music due to our spiritual connection to head-nodding baselines and hard-hitting drums. We shouldn’t die because it����ap raining, and we need to protect our crown. We shouldn’t fear of never waking up because of incompetent police killing us in our sleep. We shouldn’t have to be innocent to avoid execution. We shouldn’t die because we’re jogging. And “I can’t breathe … mama!” shouldn’t be our last words.

George Floyd wasn’t resisting. He was gasping for breath, pleading to the officer with his knee in his neck, eerily familiar to the knee of White supremacy on the neck of Black people, to allow him to breathe. George Floyd should still be breathing. Breonna Taylor was sleeping. The police conducted an illegal no-knock warrant at her home. Breonna was killed by police because her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was protecting her. Tony McDade was killed because he dared to be authentic. He dared to be genuine. He dared to live as himself. Black LGBTQ people are at greater risk of violence every day in this country.

Ahmaud Arbery should still be feeling the wind against his face on an ordinary day. However, the assumption of Black people being violent criminals since birth traveled above him like a darkened cloud. The same way it has traveled with others who look like him. The father and son duo who murdered him thought he was a thug. No matter how fast he was going, White supremacy was faster. After being shot at point-blank range with a shotgun and having the will to stumble away — attempting to run into a different reality where Black folks are free to be ordinary — he fell, face-first into the pavement, left to bleed out, in the same way George Floyd was. The same way Big Mike was.

On August 11, 2014, I got THUG LIFE tatted on me in response to the death of Michael Brown. I figured, if they see us as thugs, why not embrace it? When I show my tattoo, which sits on my left hip like a pistol ready to be drawn, friends laugh and say “you no thug!” I smirk and let it rock. But little do they know we’re all thugs. We’re all filled with animus. We’re all filled with despair.

Nevertheless, we continue to live with our heads held high. Michael, Trayvon, Breonna, Nina, Botham, Ahmuad, and many, many others lived in a world that was scared of them. And the world flinched by killing them when they dared to live. Racist Whiteness responds excessively to Blackness. Racist Whiteness calls us rioters when we are rebelling against structural racism. Racist Whiteness calls Patrick Henry a hero, and Malcolm X a terrorist. Racist Whiteness calls cops peaceful, and us thugs.

Let me be clear. There are thugs who do the work of reconstructing a just society by their very actions; influenced by society’s hatred to be better, to rebel in organized resistance. I call this The Hatred U Give Little Infants Frees Everyone. And then there are thugs who are influenced by hate, and f— everyone. Especially Black people.

Torrence Brown-Smith is a senior at the University of Northern Colorado studying sociology and Africana studies. He is a community organizer as well.

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We’re about to find out how far the already impossibly low standards to which we hold the Trump administration have fallen since then. Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center published evidence of the white nationalism of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s senior immigration adviser. The SPLC obtained more than 900 emails from 2015 and 2016 that Miller, who was then an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, sent to editors at the far-right website Breitbart to shape its coverage of race and immigration. The group got the emails from Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who, after being fired for anti-Muslim tweets, moved even further right before renouncing racism. The emails show that Miller was steeped in white nationalism before he joined the White House, where he’s had the opportunity to put his racist views into practice.

McHugh told the SPLC that her bosses introduced her to Miller so that he could help guide the site’s reporting. Miller forwarded her articles from sites like VDARE — named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America — and Alex Jones’ Infowars. Miller sent McHugh information about “immigrant crime” and offered her talking points on defending Confederate iconography in the wake of white nationalist Dylann Roof’s massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.

In one email, Miller recommended that Breitbart draw parallels between Pope Francis’ 2015 speech before Congress, in which he called on America to welcome immigrants, and the wildly racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints,” in which weak-minded leftists allow soulless brown hordes to conquer the white world. Breitbart published just such a piece a few weeks later, quoting the novel’s disparagement of the decadent West����ap aversion to genocide: “With France the Enlightened glad to grovel on her knees, no government now will dare sign its name to the genocidal deed.”

The question now is whether any of this can be made to matter. Miller’s aversion to nonwhite immigrants, after all, is hardly a secret — it����ap why he has his job in the first place. He’s been pushing white nationalist policies for three years, championing the Muslim ban and the sadistic policy of family separation and encouraging Trump to slash refugee admissions. In an email to McHugh, Miller argued against Mexican hurricane victims receiving temporary protected status, a provision protecting people displaced by natural disasters and wars from deportation. (“TPS is everything,” he wrote.) Now he’s a leading figure in an administration that has tried to yank temporary protected status from more than 300,000 people. Meanwhile, he reportedly worked on a plan with Gordon Sondland, Trump’s hackish ambassador to the European Union, to encourage more immigration from Europe. The Washington Post reported that some of his own co-workers believe he holds racist views, though he insisted otherwise.

So it����ap not a shock to learn about the roots of Miller’s ideology. There’s a difference, however, between knowing something and proving it. “The evidence is incontrovertible,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me of Miller’s white nationalist associations. “It����ap no longer speculation. It����ap now been substantiated.” He said bluntly: “Stephen Miller must resign.”

Earlier this year, when Rep. Ilhan Omar called Miller a white nationalist, powerful figures on the right slammed her as an anti-Semite because Miller is Jewish. A White House official tried to reprise this defense last week, but no one is buying it.

Though the revelations about Miller aren’t surprising, it����ap important that they not be swept away by the torrent of other news, lest we admit that even the degraded standards of 2018 no longer apply. “This is a smoking gun,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been leading the call for Miller’s resignation in Congress, adding, “We didn’t know this, because if we did, we would have demanded his resignation much earlier, and in a much more forceful way.”

Trump is, of course, unlikely to jettison his xenophobic homunculus. “Stephen is not going anywhere,” a senior White House official told The Daily Beast last week. “The president has his back.” But the pressure on Trump, and, perhaps more important, on his supporters in Congress, is only going to build.

Many elected Republicans justify their fealty to Trump by denying the white nationalist character of his administration. When the president does things that make that impossible — say, by praising racist marchers in Charlottesville or telling congresswomen of color to go back to their countries — it can force members of his party to either condemn him or condone racism.

On Monday, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the ADL, the NAACP and United We Dream sent a letter to the White House demanding Miller’s removal, writing, “Supporters of white supremacists and neo-Nazis should not be allowed to serve at any level of government.” Ocasio-Cortez sees a possibility for protests. “It����ap really just a matter of sticking to it and not allowing this to fall out of the media cycle,” she said. “This is something that I personally am committed to. This is a really big deal.” I hope she’s right. If she’s not, it will show us how much hate we’ve learned to tolerate.

Michelle Goldberg has been an ����ap columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

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The Anti-Defamation League has added the symbols to its online “Hate on Display” database, which already includes burning crosses, Ku Klux Klan robes, the swastika and many other of the most notorious and overt symbols of racism and anti-Semitism.

The New York City-based group launched the database in 2000 to help law enforcement officers, school officials and others recognize signs of extremist activity. It has grown to include nearly 200 entries.

“Even as extremists continue to use symbols that may be years or decades old, they regularly create new symbols, memes and slogans to express their hateful sentiments,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

Some of the new entries started as trolling campaigns or hateful memes on internet message boards such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, before migrating to Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream platforms, and to public forums and fliers.

The ADL has updated its database to include the “OK” hand symbol, which became fodder for a 4chan trolling campaign to dupe viewers into thinking the fingers formed the letters “W” and “P” to mean “white power.” But the ADL says extremists also are using it as a sincere expression of white supremacy.

Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man charged with killing 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, flashed the “OK” symbol during a courtroom appearance after his arrest. Tarrant also had the number 14 written on his rifle, a possible reference to the “14 Words,” a white supremacist slogan, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said context is key to interpreting whether an “OK” symbol is hateful or harmless. He said the ADL had been reluctant to add it to the database “because ‘OK’ has meant just ‘OK’ for so long.”

“At this point, there is enough of a volume of use for hateful purposes that we felt it was important to add,” Segal said.

An earlier addition to the database was Pepe the Frog , a cartoon character that became hijacked by online extremists who superimposed the frog with Nazi symbols and other hateful imagery. The ADL branded Pepe as a hate symbol in September 2016 and supported cartoonist Matt Furie’s efforts to reclaim the character he created.

The “Happy Merchant,” one of the new database entries, is an anti-Semitic meme that depicts a stereotypical image of a bearded Jewish man rubbing his hands together. Another addition, the “Moon Man” meme, is derived from “Mac Tonight,” a character in a McDonald’s advertising campaign during the 1980s. Internet trolls transformed the sunglasses-wearing cartoon moon into a vehicle for rap songs with racist and violent lyrics.

The ADL also added the “Dylann Roof Bowlcut,” an image of the hairstyle worn by the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black people in 2015 at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Roof’s bowl-style hair became an avatar for extremists, including a Washington, D.C., man whose relatives contacted the FBI to report concerns about his behavior and far-right extremist rhetoric after last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue massacre . Jeffrey Clark’s username on the Gab social media platform was “DC Bowl Gang,” an FBI agent wrote in a court filing for gun charges against Clark.

Logos of white nationalist groups including the Rise Above Movement and the American Identity Movement also are among the new ADL database entries.

The recently formed American Identity Movement is the successor to the now-dissolved Identity Evropa, which frequently plastered its white nationalist propaganda on college campuses and is one of the groups that has been sued over the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia , in August 2017.

Four members of the California-based Rise Above Movement pleaded guilty this year to attacking counterprotesters at the Charlottesville rally. A federal judge sentenced three of them to prison terms ranging from 27 months to 37 months.

But in several attacks in recent years gunmen acquired weapons as a result of mistakes, lack of follow-through or gaps in federal and state law.

Not all gun purchases are subject to a federal background check system. Even for those that are, federal law stipulates a limited number of reasons why a person would be prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm. Those include someone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison, has a substance abuse addiction, has been involuntarily committed for a mental health issue, was dishonorably discharged from the military or convicted of domestic violence/subject of a restraining order.

In 2018, there were more than 26 million background checks conducted and fewer than 100,000 people failed. Of those, the vast majority were for a criminal conviction. Just over 6,000 were rejected for a mental health issue.

Here are some of the ways mass shooters acquired their weapons:

MISTAKE IN DATA: CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, CHURCH

The gunman who killed nine worshippers in 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church acquired a handgun because of a combination of a mistake in the background database and lack of follow-through.

Dylann Roof had been arrested on drug charges just weeks earlier. Although that arrest should have prevented him from purchasing the pistol he used in the attack, the FBI examiner reviewing the sale never saw the arrest report because the wrong agency was listed in state criminal history records. After being told she had the wrong agency to review the arrest record and being directed to a different police department, she didn’t follow through.

After a three-day waiting period, Roof went back to a West Columbia store and picked up the handgun.

FBI examiners process about 22,000 inquiries per day, a Justice Department attorney said during a court case brought by relatives of the church victims.

DATA NOT UPDATED: SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TEXAS, CHURCH

The man who killed more than two dozen churchgoers in 2017 in Sutherland Springs, Texas, was able to purchase guns because his past criminal record was not submitted to the FBI database.

Devin Patrick Kelley purchased four guns from federally licensed dealers in Texas and Colorado. The military veteran passed the required background checks because the Air Force never informed the FBI about an assault on his wife and her child that led to a court-martial, a year of confinement and a bad conduct discharge.

The Air Force acknowledged that in addition to failing to submit the information in the FBI database for Kelley, it found several dozen other such reporting omissions. The Air Force has blamed gaps in “training and compliance measures” for the lapses and said it made changes to prevent failures in the future.

LACK OF ENFORCEMENT: AURORA, ILLINOIS, WORKPLACE

When Aurora, Illinois, shooter Gary Martin failed a background check and was told to turn over his weapon, he never did and police didn’t confiscate it. Martin later killed five co-workers and wounded six other people at a suburban Chicago manufacturing plant.

An initial background check failed to detect Martin’s criminal record. Months later, a second background check found his 1995 aggravated assault conviction in Mississippi involving the stabbing of an ex-girlfriend.

He was sent a letter stating his gun permit had been revoked and ordering him to turn over his firearm to police, however he never gave up the .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun.

There’s no mechanism under federal law to seize firearms from people who are prohibited from possession or purchase. Most states allow police to seize a firearm when they encounter a prohibited person. Few states have a procedure to actively retrieve and remove firearms from prohibited people.

A 2018 report by the California attorney general, for example, said that more than 20,000 people in that state have failed to surrender their firearms as required. California is one of a handful of states that seizes firearms from prohibited people. California, Connecticut, and Nevada require prohibited people to provide proof they’ve complied and relinquished their firearms.

PRIVATE PURCHASE: WEST TEXAS RAMPAGE

The gunman who went on a rampage last weekend along a 10-mile stretch around Midland and Odessa, Texas, killing seven people and injuring about two dozen, had failed a background check in 2014. Authorities believe Seth Aaron Ator evaded the background check system by purchasing the weapon he used through a private transaction. They searched a home in Lubbock that they believe is associated with the person who supplied the gun.

Under federal law, private sales of firearms — such as between friends, relatives or even strangers — are not required to undergo a federal background check. Some 21 states plus Washington, D.C., have laws that require background checks on some private sales, but Texas isn’t one of them. Two other states — Maryland and Pennsylvania — require a background check for handguns but not long guns.

A study by Harvard University researchers published in 2017 found that 22 percent of current gun owners who acquired a firearm in the previous two years reported doing so without a background check.

While Americans are allowed to make their own firearms, they cannot do so commercially. It is illegal to make and sell guns as a business without being a licensed dealer or manufacturer. Some sales at gun shows also are not subject to a background check.

TOOK FROM RELATIVES: NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT; MARYSVILLE, WASHINGTON AND SANTA FE, TEXAS

The 20-year-old who killed 20 students and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, took the firearms he used from his mother’s collection. Adam Lanza killed her first in the home they shared before going to the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he carried out his attack in 2012.

In 2014, 15-year-old Jaylen Fryberg killed four classmates and wounded one other in Marysville, Washington, before killing himself. He was armed with a .40-caliber Beretta Px4 Storm handgun that he stole from his father. Fryberg’s father was later convicted of illegally obtaining the gun for failing to acknowledge on federal firearm forms that he was the subject of a tribal domestic-violence protective order. That order was never sent into the state or federal criminal databases.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old high school student in Santa Fe, Texas, is accused of killing eight students and two substitute teachers in 2018 with a shotgun and pistol he took from his father’s closet.

LEGALLY ACQUIRED: LAS VEGAS; AURORA, COLORADO; ROSEBURG, OREGON, AND ORLANDO AND PARKLAND, FLORIDA

The man who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — the Las Vegas attack that left 58 people killed and more than 500 wounded in 2017 — legally acquired 33 of the 49 weapons between October 2016 and Sept. 28, 2017, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The gunmen who carried out attacks at a high school in Parkland, Florida; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida; Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, all passed background checks and purchased their firearms legally.

Attorney General William Barr instructed the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions starting in December for five men, all accused of murdering children. Although the death penalty remains legal in 30 states, executions on the federal level are rare.

“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said.

The move is likely to stir up fresh interest in an issue that has largely lain dormant in recent years, adding a new front to the culture battles that President Donald Trump already is waging on matters such as abortion and immigration in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.

Most Democrats oppose capital punishment. Vice President Joe Biden this week shifted to call for the elimination of the federal death penalty after years of supporting it.

By contrast, Trump has spoken often — and sometimes wistfully — about capital punishment and his belief that executions serve as both an effective deterrent and appropriate punishment for some crimes, including mass shootings and the killings of police officers.

“I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue,” Trump said last year after 11 people were gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

He’s suggested repeatedly that the U.S. might be better off if it adopted harsh drug laws like those embraced by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, under whom thousands of drug suspects have been killed by police.

Trump was a vocal proponent of the death penalty for decades before taking office, most notably in 1989 when he took out full-page advertisements in New York City newspapers urging elected officials to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY” following the rape of a jogger in Central Park. “If the punishment is strong,” he wrote then, “the attacks on innocent people will stop.”

Five Harlem teenagers were convicted in the Central Park case but had their convictions vacated years later after another man confessed to the rape. More than a decade after their exoneration, the city agreed to pay the so-called Central Park Five $41 million, a settlement Trump blasted as “outrageous.”

The death penalty remains legal in 30 states, but only a handful regularly conduct executions. Texas has executed 108 prisoners since 2010, far more than any other state.

Executions on the federal level have long been rare. The government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, the most recent of which occurred in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.

In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.

That review has been completed, Barr said Thursday, and it has cleared the way for executions to resume.

Barr approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug cocktail previously used in federal execution with a single drug, pentobarbital. This is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas.

Though there hasn’t been a federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.

Robert Dunham, the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, said he was concerned the process for resuming executions was rushed.

“The federal government hasn’t carried out any executions in 15 years and so that raises serious questions about the ability to carry out the executions properly,” he said.

There are 61 people on the federal death row, according to Death Row USA, a quarterly report of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Some of the highest-profile inmates on federal death row include Dylann Roof, who killed nine black church members during a Bible study session in 2015 at a South Carolina church, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who set off bombs near the Boston Marathon’s finish line in 2013, killing three people and wounding more than 260.

About 6 in 10 Americans favor the death penalty, according to the General Social Survey, a major trends survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. While a majority continue to express support for the death penalty, the share has declined steadily since the 1990s, when nearly three-quarters were in favor.

The inmates who will be executed are: Danny Lee, who was convicted of killing a family of three, including an 8-year-old; Lezmond Mitchell, who beheaded a 63-year-old woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter; Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and killed an 80-year-old woman; Alfred Bourgeois, who tortured, molested and then beat his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to death; and Dustin Lee Honken, who killed five people, including two children.

The federal government would join eight states that have executed inmates or are planning to do so this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas is far and away the leading state when it comes to using the death penalty, with 563 executions since capital punishment resumed in the U.S. in 1977 after a 10-year pause.

In the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has banned the execution of people who are intellectually disabled or were under 18 when they killed someone. But even as the number of people who are sentenced to death and are executed has declined steadily for two decades, the justices have resisted any wholesale reconsideration of the constitutionality of capital punishment.

The five-justice conservative majority, which includes Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s two high court picks, has complained about delaying tactics employed by lawyers for death row inmates.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Mark Sherman, Elana Schor and Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.

Offline, in this suburb of Rochester, New York, Vetromile was finishing requirements for promotion to Eagle Scout in a troop that met at a local church. He enrolled at Monroe Community College, taking classes to become a heating and air conditioning technician. On weekends, he spent hours in the driveway with his father, a Navy veteran, working on cars.

On social media, though, the teenager spoke in world-worn tones about the need to “reclaim our nation at any cost.” Eventually he subbed out the grinning selfie in his Twitter profile, replacing it with the image of a colonial militiaman shouldering an AR-15 rifle. And he traded his name for a handle: “Standing on the Edge.”

That edge became apparent in Vetromile’s posts, including many interactions over the last two years with accounts that praised the Confederacy, warned of looming gun confiscation and declared Muslims to be a threat.

In 2016, he sent the first of more than 70 replies to tweets from a fiery account with 140,000 followers, run by a man billing himself as Donald Trump’s biggest Canadian supporter. The final exchange came late last year.

“Islamic Take Over Has Begun: Muslim No-Go Zones Are Springing Up Across America. Lock and load America!” the Canadian tweeted on December 12, with a video and a map highlighting nine states with Muslim enclaves.

“The places listed are too vague,” Vetromile replied. “If there were specific locations like ‘north of X street in the town of Y, in the state of Z’ we could go there and do something about it.”

Weeks later, police arrested Vetromile and three friends, charging them with plotting to attack a Muslim settlement in rural New York. And with extremism on the rise across the U.S., this town of neatly kept Cape Cods confronted difficult questions about ideology and young people — and technology’s role in bringing them together.

___

The reality of the plot Vetromile and his friends are charged with hatching is, in some ways, both less and more than what was feared when they were arrested in January.

Prosecutors say there is no indication that the four — Vetromile, 19; Brian Colaneri, 20; Andrew Crysel, 18; and a 16-year-old The Associated Press isn’t naming because of his age — had set an imminent or specific date for an attack. Reports they had an arsenal of 23 guns are misleading; the weapons belonged to parents or other relatives.

Prosecutors allege the four discussed using those guns, along with explosive devices investigators say were made by the 16-year-old, in an attack on the community of Islamberg.

Residents of the settlement in Delaware County, New York — mostly African-American Muslims who relocated from Brooklyn in the 1980s — have been harassed for years by right-wing activists who have called it a terrorist training camp. A Tennessee man, Robert Doggart , was convicted in 2017 of plotting to burn down Islamberg’s mosque and other buildings.

But there are few clues so far to explain how four with little experience beyond their high school years might have come up with the idea to attack the community. All have pleaded not guilty, and several defense attorneys, back in court Friday, are arguing there was no plan to actually carry out any attack, chalking it up to talk among buddies. Lawyers for the four did not return calls, and parents or other relatives declined interviews.

“I don’t know where the exposure came from, if they were exposed to it from other kids at school, through social media,” said Matthew Schwartz, the Monroe County assistant district attorney prosecuting the case. “I have no idea if their parents subscribe to any of these ideologies.”

Well beyond upstate New York, the spread of extremist ideology online has sparked growing concern. Google and Facebook executives went before the House Judiciary Committee this month to answer questions about their platforms’ role in feeding hate crime and white nationalism. Twitter announced new rules last fall prohibiting the use of “dehumanizing language” that risks “normalizing serious violence.”

But experts said the problem goes beyond language, pointing to algorithms used by search engines and social media platforms to prioritize content and spotlight likeminded accounts.

“Once you indicate an inclination, the machine learns,” said Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at New York’s Hunter College who studies the online contagion of alt-right ideology. “That����ap exactly what����ap happening on all these platforms … and it just sends some people down a terrible rabbit hole.”

She and others point to Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. In writings found afterward, Roof recalled how his interest in the shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin had prompted a Google search for the term “black on white crime.” The first site the search engine pointed him to was run by a racist group promoting the idea that such crime is common, and as he learned more, Roof wrote, that eventually drove his decision to attack the congregation.

In the Rochester-area case, electronic messages between two of those arrested, seen by the AP, along with papers filed in the case suggest doubts divided the group.

“I honestly see him being a terrorist,” one of those arrested, Crysel, told his friend Colaneri in an exchange last December on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers that has also gained notoriety for its embrace by some followers of the alt-right.

“He also has a very odd obsession with pipe bombs,” Colaneri replied. “Like it����ap borderline creepy.”

It is not clear from the message fragment seen which of the others they were referencing. What is clear, though, is the long thread of frustration in Vetromile’s online posts — and the way those posts link him to an enduring conspiracy theory.

___

A few years ago, Vetromile’s posts on Twitter and Instagram touched on subjects like video games and English class.

He made the honor roll as an 11th-grader but sometime thereafter was suspended and never returned, according to former classmates and others. The school district, citing federal law on student records, declined to provide details.

Ron Gerth, who lives across the street from the family, recalled Vetromile as a boy roaming the neighborhood with a friend, pitching residents on a leaf-raking service: “Just a normal, everyday kid wanting to make some money, and he figured a way to do it.” More recently, Gerth said, Vetromile seemed shy and withdrawn, never uttering more than a word or two if greeted on the street.

Vetromile and suspect Andrew Crysel earned the rank of Eagle in Boy Scout Troop 240, where the 16-year-old was also a member. None ever warranted concern, said Steve Tyler, an adult leader.

“Every kid’s going to have their own sort of geekiness,” Tyler said, “but nothing that would ever be considered a trigger or a warning sign that would make us feel unsafe.”

Crysel and the fourth suspect, Colaneri, have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a milder form of autism, their families have said. Friends described Colaneri as socially awkward and largely disinterested in politics. “He asked, if we’re going to build a wall around the Gulf of Mexico, how are people going to go to the beach?” said Rachael Lee, the aunt of Colaneri’s girlfriend.

Vetromile attended community college with Colaneri before dropping out in 2017. By then, he was fully engaged in online conversations about immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, gun rights and Trump. Over time, his statements became increasingly militant.

“We need a revolution now!” he tweeted in January, replying to a thread warning of a coming “war” over gun ownership.

Vetromile directed some of his strongest statements at Muslims. Tweets from the Canadian account, belonging to one Mike Allen, seemed to push that button.

In July 2017, Allen tweeted “Somali Muslims take over Tennessee town and force absolute HELL on terrified Christians.” Vetromile replied: “@realDonaldTrump please do something about this!”

A few months later, Allen tweeted: “Czech politicians vote to let citizens carry guns, shoot Muslim terrorists on sight.” Vetromile’s response: “We need this here!”

Allen’s posts netted hundreds of replies a day, and there’s no sign he read Vetromile’s responses. But others did, including the young man’s reply to the December post about Muslim “no-go zones.”

That tweet included a video interview with Martin Mawyer, whose Christian Action Network made a 2009 documentary alleging that Islamberg and other settlements were terrorist training camps. Mawyer linked the settlements, which follow the teachings of a controversial Pakistani cleric, to a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra that drew scrutiny from law enforcement in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993, Colorado prosecutors won convictions of four al-Fuqra members in a racketeering case that included charges of fraud, arson and murder.

Police and analysts have repeatedly said Islamberg does not threaten violence. Nevertheless, the allegations of Mawyer’s group continue to circulate widely online and in conservative media.

Replying to questions by email, Mawyer said his organization has used only legal means to try to shut down the operator of the settlements.

“Vigilante violence is always the wrong way to solve social or personal problems,” he said. “Christian Action Network had no role, whatsoever, in inciting any plots.”

Online, though, Vetromile reacted with consternation to the video of Mawyer: “But this video just says ‘upstate NY and California’ and that����ap too big of an area to search for terrorists,” he wrote.

Other followers replied with suggestions. “Doesn’t the video state Red House, Virginia as the place?” one asked. Virginia was too far, Vetromile replied, particularly since the map with the tweet showed an enclave in his own state.

When another follower offered a suggestion, Vetromile signed off: “Eh worth a look. Thanks.”

The exchange ended without a word from the Canadian account, whose tweet started it.

___

Three months before the December exchange on Twitter, the four suspects started using a Discord channel dubbed “#leaders-only” to discuss weapons and how they would use them in an attack, prosecutors allege. Vetromile set up the channel, one of the defense attorneys contends, but prosecutors say they don’t consider any one of the four a leader.

In November, the conversation expanded to a second channel: “#militia-soldiers-wanted.”

At some point last fall the 16-year-old made a grenade — “on a whim to satisfy his own curiosity,” his lawyer said in a court filing that claims the teen never told the other suspects. That filing also contends the boy told Vetromile that forming a militia was “stupid.”

But other court records contradict those assertions. Another teen, who is not among the accused, told prosecutors that the 16-year-old showed him what looked like a pipe bomb last fall and then said that Vetromile had asked for prototypes. “Let me show you what Vinnie gave me,” the young suspect allegedly said during another conversation, before leaving the room and returning with black explosive powder.

In January, the 16-year-old was in the school cafeteria when he showed a photo to a classmate of one of his fellow suspects, wearing some kind of tactical vest. He made a comment like, “He looks like the next school shooter, doesn’t he?” according to Greece Police Chief Patrick Phelan. The other student reported the incident, and questioning by police led to the arrests and charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

The allegations have jarred a region where political differences are the norm. Rochester, roughly half white and half black and other minorities, votes heavily Democratic. Neighboring Greece, which is 87 percent white, leans conservative. Town officials went to the Supreme Court to win a 2014 ruling allowing them to start public meetings with a chaplain’s prayer.

The arrests dismayed Bob Lonsberry, a conservative talk radio host in Rochester, who said he checked Twitter to confirm Vetromile didn’t follow his feed. But looking at the accounts Vetromile did follow convinced him that politics on social media had crossed a dangerous line.

“The people up here, even the hillbillies like me, we would go down with our guns and stand outside the front gate of Islamberg to protect them,” Lonsberry said. “It����ap an aberration. But … aberrations, like a cancer, pop up for a reason.”

___

Online, it can be hard to know what is true and who is real. Mike Allen, though, is no bot.

“He seems addicted to getting followers,” said Allen’s adult son, Chris, when told about the arrest of one of the thousands attuned to his father’s Twitter feed. Allen himself called back a few days later, leaving a brief message with no return number.

But a few weeks ago, Allen welcomed in a reporter who knocked on the door of his home, located less than an hour from the Peace Bridge linking upstate New York to Ontario, Canada.

“I really don’t believe in regulation of the free marketplace of ideas,” said Allen, a retired real estate executive, explaining his approach to social media. “If somebody wants to put bulls– on Facebook or Twitter, it����ap no worse than me selling a bad hamburger, you know what I mean? Buyer beware.”

Sinking back in a white leather armchair, Allen, 69, talked about his longtime passion for politics. After a liver transplant stole much of his stamina a few years ago, he filled downtime by tweeting about subjects like interest rates.

When Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, in a speech memorable for labeling many Mexican immigrants as criminals, Allen said he was determined to help get the billionaire elected. He began posting voraciously, usually finding material on conservative blogs and Facebook feeds and crafting posts to stir reaction.

Soon his account was gaining up to 4,000 followers a week.

Allen said he had hoped to monetize his feed somehow. But suspicions that Twitter “shadow-banning” was capping gains in followers made him consider closing the account. That was before he was shown some of his tweets and the replies they drew from Vetromile — and told the 19-year-old was among the suspects charged with plotting to attack Islamberg.

“And they got caught? Good,” Allen said. “We’re not supposed to go around shooting people we don’t like. That����ap why we have video games.”

Allen’s own likes and dislikes are complicated. He said he strongly opposes taking in refugees for humanitarian reasons, arguing only immigrants with needed skills be admitted. He also recounted befriending a Muslim engineer in Pakistan through a physics blog and urging him to move to Canada.

Shown one of his tweets from last year — claiming Czech officials had urged people to shoot Muslims — Allen shook his head.

“That����ap not a good tweet,” he said quietly. “It����ap inciting.”

Allen said he rarely read replies to his posts — and never noticed Vetromile’s.

“If I’d have seen anybody talking violence, I would have banned them,” he said.

He turned to his wife, Kim, preparing dinner across the kitchen counter. Maybe he should stop tweeting, he told her. But couldn’t he continue until Trump was reelected?

“We have a saying, ‘Oh, it must be true, I read it on the internet,’” Allen said, before showing his visitor out. “The internet is phony. It����ap not there. Only kids live in it and old guys, you know what I mean? People with time on their hands.”

The next day, Allen shut down his account, and the long narrative he spun all but vanished.

___

Read more about the four charged in the New York plot here . AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this story. Geller can be reached at ageller@ap.org or at https://twitter.com/AdGeller

But there’s no comparable arrangement for sharing intelligence about domestic terrorist organizations, including right-wing extremists like the one suspected in the killing of 49 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, according to current and former national security officials and counterterrorism experts.

Governments generally see nationalist extremist groups as a problem for domestic law enforcement and security agencies to confront. In the United States, that responsibility falls principally to the FBI.

But increasingly, nationalist groups in different countries are drawing inspiration from each other, uniting in common cause via social media, experts said. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the 28-year-old suspected gunman in Christchurch, posted a manifesto full of rage on Twitter in which he cited other right-wing extremists as his inspiration, among them Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Tarrant also had white supremacist slogans scrawled on weapons, according to video he took.

The intelligence services of New Zealand and the United States – along with those in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia – enjoy a close working relationship. The so-called Five Eyes routinely share highly classified intelligence about al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, gleaned from their respective networks of surveillance systems and human spies.

Some experts say the allies need to think about how they can turn their resources toward threats that may reside within their borders but arguably threaten their common security.

“With its mix of global inspiration and local action, far-right extremism has inspired killings inside the U.S. and every one of the Five Eyes, ranging from mass shootings and bombings to assassinations of political leaders,” said P.W. Singer, a counterterrorism researcher and strategist at New America, a think tank in Washington. “The sad events in New Zealand illustrate why we have to have the political bravery to stop ignoring what is a real terrorist threat that has killed more Americans than even ISIS.”

Current and former officials said that if the United States had intelligence about an imminent attack by domestic radicals in another country, it would quickly alert authorities there. But as a routine matter, the countries’ intelligence services are not exchanging information.

Officials in the Five Eyes countries do discuss the rise of nationalist groups, but the topic doesn’t feature nearly as prominently as threats from transnational organizations, said Nicholas J. Rasmussen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

“We talked about it in terms of how the process of radicalization in various forms of extremist groups compares to each other but not in the context of specific cases or intelligence exchanges,” he said.

The Christchurch shooting may lead officials to reconsider that approach.

“In my own view, it is worth exploring whether and how much overseas collaboration and cooperation takes place between individuals and groups involved in domestic extremism and terrorism activities in each of our countries, because there is clearly an alignment of ideological views and agendas between at least some of these subjects,” Rasmussen said.

At least in the United States, sharing information about individual suspects would be complicated by privacy law and regulations that restrict what U.S. intelligence agencies can collect about citizens and permanent residents in the country.

But the Five Eyes countries are collecting information that speaks to trends, including how nationalists are becoming radicalized, the common grievances they share and the methods they’re using to communicate when they do try to forge alliances.

That information, experts said, could be shared more easily among nations with an eye toward improving their efforts to prevent attacks and, in the long run, counter radical ideologies and stop susceptible people from joining the ranks of militant groups.

“These groups are obviously learning from each other,” said Joshua Geltzer, who served as the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration. He said that the United States is not likely to know as much about domestic radical groups in New Zealand as the island country’s security services do, so on a practical level there may not be much tactical intelligence to share.

But countries talk to each other about the broader trends they’re seeing, including how domestic radicals are learning from each other, who they cite as their inspiration and where they are congregating online, Geltzer said.

That effort may face resistance from President Donald Trump, who has downplayed the threat from white nationalism in the United States and abroad.

“I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing,” Trump said during an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office on Friday.

The president said he hadn’t seen the suspected shooter’s manifesto, which named Trump as inspiration for white identity ideology.

Former U.S. officials said the Trump administration should prioritize restoring positions and task forces that were trying to address the domestic terrorism threat until they were sidelined after he took office.

“This attack should have us asking ourselves whether or not we have a sufficient whole-of-government approach to this evolving terrorism threat,” said Lisa Monaco, who served as the homeland security adviser to President Barack Obama. In the Trump White House, that official no longer reports directly to the president.

“We don’t have a clear domestic lead in our federal government for these issues,” Monaco said.

Rasmussen said concerns about violating Americans’ privacy should not be a permanent obstacle to increasing collaboration among the Five Eyes countries.

“We may need to address this constraint, much as we over the years became more comfortable sharing such information on U.S. persons who were the subjects of international terrorism concern,” he said.

“We probably don’t know what we don’t know in terms of some of these international connections” among domestic groups, Rasmussen added. “And we won’t know until we share more information with our trusted partners in order to see what they know.”

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand – Manacled and barefoot, Brenton Harrison Tarrant walked into a courtroom on Saturday and flashed an “OK” sign, widely seen as a symbol of white power, as he stood defiantly to face murder charges less than 24 hours after brutal assaults on two mosques in this city left at least 49 dead.

Police named Tarrant the primary suspect in what was called the deadliest attack in New Zealand history – and one of the worst cases of right-wing terrorism in years – after the 28 year-old Australian allegedly stormed two mosques during midday prayers on Friday and mowed down dozens of huddling and fleeing worshippers while he streamed the mass killing over social media with a body-mounted camera.

Two others have been arrested in connection with the shootings: A second man, 18-year old Daniel John Burrough, is expected to appear in court soon and face charges of inciting racial hostility or ill will. A third accomplice remains unidentified.

Christchurch hospital officials said midday Saturday that 39 people, including 2 children, remained hospitalized, with 11 in critical condition. Authorities said Tarrant was the prime suspect, and there were no immediate signs that he was part of a broader plot. Still, scores of additional police were deployed as New Zealand raised its national security threat level to “high” for the first time in its history.

The murderous rampage sundered life in New Zealand, an island country of 5 million celebrated for its low crime rate, and sent shock waves around the world at a time when many countries are grappling with the rise in right-wing extremism.

During his hearing, which was closed to the public by Judge Paul Kellar in the interest of safety – an unusual move for New Zealand courts – Tarrant did not enter a plea to the murder charge. He appeared in white prison garb and stayed silent throughout.

Photos from the courtroom showed Tarrant standing in the dock, flanked by two police officers, as he shaped his right thumb and forefinger in a gesture that is widely seen as signifying white power. He will remain in custody and appear at another hearing on April 5, when he is expected to face additional charges. The judge ordered that photographs of Tarrant’s face be pixelated, to protect the integrity of the trial process.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who decried the attack as an act of terrorism that plunged New Zealand into one of its “darkest days,” said Saturday that the country’s security services were tracking the “global rise in extreme right-wing rhetoric” but had not put Tarrant on a watch list. Security officials are now investigating whether they had overlooked signs of an imminent attack, Ardern said.

The New Zealand Herald reported Saturday that Tarrant had sent a copy of a lengthy manifesto explaining his actions to Ardern’s office and many media outlets minutes before the attack began.

None of the three arrested suspects had criminal records, and Tarrant had a registered address in southern New Zealand but lived in the country sporadically. Instead, the former fitness trainer led an itinerant lifestyle and traveled extensively to Bulgaria, North Korea and countries with large Muslim populations, including Turkey and Pakistan, officials said.

Yet in a 74-page manifesto posted on social media before the shooting, Tarrant explicitly vowed an attack to kill Muslim “invaders” and seek revenge for crimes perpetrated by Muslims. In the document, which was laced with inside jokes and references to fringe online subculture, Tarrant said hoped his actions would curb immigration, deepen strife in the United States over gun ownership and start a civil war.

He also expressed his admiration for Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik, two far-right mass killers, and scrawled neo-Nazi symbols and slogans on his weapons, which included two rifles and two shotguns.

Ardern, who has vowed to change New Zealand’s gun laws following the shooting, said her government was looking into how Tarrant had modified his rifles to make them more deadly. She didn’t give details about gun legislation she was considering, but New Zealand Attorney General David Parker reportedly said at an Auckland rally on Saturday the government would ban semiautomatic rifles.

Tarrant obtained a license in November 2017 for the guns that would be used in the shooting; he began purchasing the weapons that December, according to officials.

A day after the massacre, Christchurch woke up to confront an incomprehensible aftermath. Friends and families of the dead pleaded with police to allow access to bodies so they could perform Islamic death rituals. The more fortunate rushed to the Christchurch Hospital to visit survivors, some of whom were bullet-riddled.

Many laid flowers at large vigils. Others volunteered at a Salvation Army station outside the mosque to offer what they could: soup, pies, words of comfort.

Outside the Christchurch courtroom on Saturday, Omar and Yama Nabi spoke about their lost 71-year old father Hajji Daoud Nabi, a refugee of the Soviet-Afghan War who arrived in New Zealand decades ago.

Survivors told Omar Nabi that his father had leaped on top of another worshipper as a human shield when the attack unfolded at Al Noor mosque. Nabi had come to the court to get a glimpse of the man who killed his father, he said, but the public was not allowed inside.

“I need to sit there and watch what’s going on,” Nabi said. “One part of me wants to kill him, but this is not what I want to portray Muslims as.”

Yama Nabi narrowly averted danger after arriving late to Friday prayers. By the time he arrived, he said, he saw a Somali man cradling his dead son and bodies strewn in the mosque’s hallway, a grisly scene visible from the street.

As the overcast sky gave way to gently pattering rain, Rami, 28, stood outside the Christchurch hospital and recalled his desperation on Friday as he spoke on the phone with his father, who was shot and bleeding inside the mosque. Police would not let Rami or paramedics into the mosque immediately after the shooting as they tried to ensure the area was secured.

“It was a horrific incident and horrific to be on the phone to my Dad,” Rami said as he waited outside the hospital for his father to recover from nerve reconstruction surgery.

“He was shot in the thigh and the buttocks, it hit his hip. . . . He’s in a lot of pain,” he said.

The killings touched a nerve around the world. President Donald Trump, in a statement issued Friday morning, extended his “warmest sympathy and best wishes” to the people of New Zealand. Hours later, Trump downplayed the danger of rising white nationalist extremism. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems,” he said.

The massacre, seemingly designed and carried out as performance for an online audience, has renewed scrutiny of the unfiltered power of the large social media hubs, including Facebook and Twitter, but also of the dark and freewheeling online forums like 8chan, where hate speech mingles with memes and wisecracks.

Social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Reddit on Friday removed the shooter’s video, but it was immediately reposted elsewhere. As a result, the shooter got precisely what he wanted: the attention of millions who watched a chilling, first-person record of the gunman walking up to the Al Noor Mosque and firing hundreds of bullets, slaughtering dozens without saying a word. In a six-minute video segment, he walks back to his car to get another weapon before doubling back to kill the wounded.

Authorities in Australia said Tarrant’s relatives in the sleepy town of Grafton had come forward to assist with their investigation into his past and path to radicalization. In his own manifesto laying out his thinking and influences, Tarrant said he developed racist views and began planning his operation in 2017 after a trip to Europe.

Tarrant titled his 16,000-screed “The Great Replacement,” echoing the name of a book by a far-right French polemicist Renaud Camus. The phrase has also been the rallying cry of, among others, the torch-bearing protesters who marched in Charlottesville in 2017.

At one point in the rambling document, which was littered with conspiracy theories about white birthrates and “white genocide,” Tarrant called Trump a “symbol of white identity” but in the same sentence derided the president’s ability as a political leader.

In a country of nearly 5 million, more than 46,000 residents of New Zealand are Muslim, according to data from the 2013 Census, up 28 percent from 2006. Many of the shooting victims were refugees or migrants from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Members of a refugee family who had fled Syria’s civil war appeared to be among the victims, Ali Akil, an Auckland-based spokesman for Syrian Solidarity New Zealand, said in an interview. The family’s father was killed, a son was seriously wounded, and another son was reported missing, Akil said, citing information he had received from a friend of the family.

Akil said the family had likely come to New Zealand in the past four or five years, to “a safe haven, only to be killed here.”

Ardern, the prime minister, said New Zealand was chosen for the attack “because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values.”

“This is not the New Zealand any of us know,” she said.

“I don’t really,” Trump said when asked at the White House whether white nationalists were a growing global threat. “I think it����ap a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It����ap certainly a terrible thing.”

Trump said he had not seen a manifesto, purportedly from one of the attackers, that named him as an inspiration for white identity ideology.

Trump’s remarks came during an Oval Office ceremony he held to issue his first veto of a resolution blocking him from moving money around to build a wall along the southern border aimed at keeping out undocumented immigrants.

Trump, who has stoked fear about violent criminals and terrorists coming into the country from Mexico, has also claimed without evidence that “Middle Easterns” are sneaking in with asylum seekers and that Muslim prayer rugs had been found at the border.

During the veto signing, Trump referred to people trying to invade the United States as a reason for the wall. The New Zealand shooter in his manifesto wrote about invasions of foreigners.

Steve Cohen, a former Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said there is concern among law enforcement that Trump used the same language.

“These white supremacists live in this conspiratorial bizarro world,” Cohen said. “They will draw a connection between the use of that language by the person who wrote the manifesto and statements being made by our government. That is what is concerning law enforcement.”

Trump has a long history of derogatory remarks about Muslims, including declaring in 2016 that “Islam hates us.” He formally proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States during the presidential campaign, and since taking office his administration has implemented policies barring citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

Shortly before 7:30 a.m., the White House issued its first response, in the form of a statement, to the attacks in Christchurch. Trump followed up with a message on Twitter about 10 minutes later.

“My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured,” he wrote. “The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!”

Trump also said he had spoken with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to offer his condolences and support.

The alleged shooter wrote that he was a supporter of Trump in one sense but not completely: “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policymaker and leader? Dear god no.”

In the document, the man also stated that he was following the example of notorious right-wing extremists, including Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway when asked about the shooter’s reference to Trump said, “The shooter is an evil, hateful person who is wrong about that.”

The Washington Post����ap Isaac Stanley-Becker and Katie Zezima contributed to this report.

Prosecutors described how Elizabeth Lecron had a fascination with perpetrators of mass killings and aspired to follow in their footsteps in court documents filed Monday, when she was charged with transporting explosives and explosive material with the purpose of harming others.

Officials with the FBI and Department of Justice said Lecron, 23, bought hundreds of screws and black powder last weekend.

She appeared in federal court Monday and waived a preliminary hearing. A message seeking comment was left with the federal public defender’s office, which will represent Lecron.

Lecron talked with undercover agents and informants about carrying out a mass killing at a Toledo bar and later switched to talking about attacking a livestock farm and a factory where she worked, according to an affidavit.

Authorities have been investigating Lecron and a man she was living with in Toledo since June and say they both talked about carrying out violent attacks. None of those plans were carried out, and the man has not been publicly identified or charged.

A search of their home in August turned up AK-47, a shotgun, multiple handguns and large amounts of ammunition, court documents said.

Lecron began sending letters in July to Dylann Roof, a white supremacist sentenced to death in the killings of nine black worshippers in a racist attack in Charleston, South Carolina, according to the documents. She also sent him a book on Nazis that he had requested.

“You have a lot of people who care for you beyond those walls,” she wrote.

In mid-August, Lecron walked onto the grounds of Columbine High School, where a security guard questioned her because he thought she was acting suspiciously, according to the filings. In 1999, two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher at the Colorado school.

Lecron told the guard that she wanted to see the memorial there and later posted photos of the trip.

Undercover agents approached her a week ago, the filings said, and told her they wanted to blow up a pipeline but needed someone to buy the supplies.

“Absolutely,” she responded, according to an investigator. “I can’t wait to see it on the news.”

She met on Saturday with an informant, who gave her money, and she bought the supplies at stores in the Toledo area, the documents said.