by Katha Pollitt

About the author: Katha Pollitt is a columnist for the Nation, an independent weekly opinion magazine.

It didn’t take long for the press to connect 21-year-old white-supremacist multikiller Benjamin Smith with the all-purpose explanation du jour: violent entertainment, in this case the computer game Dungeons & Dragons. This replaces the explanation, given by his mentor, Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, that Smith was driven to shoot minorities in the Midwest over the July 4, 1999, weekend—six Orthodox Jews, at least three blacks, two Asians—because political correctness prevented him from expressing his racial theories verbally. It turns out Smith expressed himself verbally quite a bit: His views were widely known to his fellow students at Indiana University. And physically, too...