What's in a name?

Why are people referring to these white Nativist killers generically, or individually, as white supremacists?

What's the foundation for that?

What we know is that they resent, fear, and want to stop nonwhite immigration in order to at least delay the approaching demographic sorpasso that will happen when the nonwhites of America outnumber the whites.

That makes them white Nativists.

That does not make them white supremacists.

But maybe there is material in those manifestoes that shows they are that, too.

What, I wonder.

Sen. Brian Schatz: "We have a white supremacist problem"

Santorum: "The person in El Paso is a white supremacist."

Everybody seems to be calling these guys that, today.

Maybe this absurdly broad usage at the ADL helps explain it.

White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co- exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own "culture" that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people.

In truth I would have thought belief in point 1 is, all by itself, the sum and substance of white supremacism, taking "other backgrounds" to (somehow) mean "other races".

And is that actually what these guys think or want?

Wanting white Americans to be spared slipping into minority status in the US is not and does not entail that, nor any others of the 4 points the ADL identified (though I suppose it's a safe bet these guys accept 3 and 4 in that ADL list, and maybe even 2 as some sort of ideal case).

And it's certainly not what the exterminationist fans of The Turner Diaries want.

They don't want to rule people of other races. They want to kill all of them.

Anyway, the ADL takes a considerably broader view than seems to be common in online dictionaries.

Here's one that's typical.

Definition of white supremacist : a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.

But that's to my mind too restrictive, since anyone who believed the second but not the first would not count as a white supremacist, on this definition; that seems wrong to me.

Update.

It seems right to call them white nationalists, too.

We would not hesitate, I think, to call a group of ethnic Estonians out to ensure ethnic Estonians remain a majority in Estonia rather than being eclipsed by Russian immigrants a group of Estonian nationalists.

The analogy is close enough.