The expanding web of hate: Bigotry aims at multiple targets

In one day recently, two young people were shot in the back and killed. In another, twelve were wounded with Molotov cocktails and a DYI flamethrower. Two horrendous attacks against the Jewish community in less than two weeks. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, the propensity in the United States for deadly antisemitic acts has grown alarmingly and could increase in the wake of Israel’s war with Iran. Who is to blame?

Hate often wears a mask of specificity. A pundit rails against immigrants. A protester denounces Black Americans. A commentator warns of the “globalist elite,” gesturing toward antisemitic tropes. At first glance, these hatreds appear isolated, each grounded in its own animus, its own cultural or historical grievance. But beneath the surface lies a more troubling pattern: hatred toward one group often coexists—and evolves—into hatred of many.

This phenomenon has been well documented by psychologists, historians, and writers alike. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and a team of scholars published The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that a particular psychological profile—rigid, conformist, submissive to authority—predisposes individuals to a generalized prejudice. Such people do not merely dislike one group; they harbor resentment and suspicion toward all who deviate from a narrow vision of national, cultural, or moral purity.

This concept is not merely academic. It reverberates through literature, memoir, film, and lived experience. The Holocaust is perhaps the most horrifying example: while Jews were the primary targets of Nazi extermination, they were not the only ones. Roma, Slavs, disabled individuals, homosexuals, and political dissidents were also imprisoned and killed. Hatred did not remain confined to one ethnic group; it metastasized, institutionalized, and mechanized itself across multiple populations. 

The famous statement “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist” originates from a postwar reflection by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. Written in 1946, this piece serves as a candid admission of silence and inaction during the Nazi regime. Niemöller’s words lament how many, including members of the clergy and intellectuals like himself, failed to protest the persecution of targeted groups. The message unfolds through a haunting sequence, noting that he also remained silent when Socialists, trade unionists, and Jews became the targets of hate—each time rationalizing his inaction because he did not belong to those groups. Ultimately, he observes, when the oppressors finally came for him, no one remained to defend him. The passage underscores the moral peril of indifference and the cumulative danger of ignoring injustice against others.

Memoirs such as Elie Wiesel’s Night expose this broad spectrum of hate, even when their focus remains intensely personal. Wiesel’s recollection of the camps makes clear that Nazi ideology was less a scalpel and more a cudgel. The system did not discriminate in its discrimination. Its hatred was total.

James McBride’s The Color of Water, a poignant memoir of racial identity and maternal devotion, demonstrates this same dynamic in the American context. McBride, the son of a Black father and a white Jewish mother, confronts racism and antisemitism not as parallel phenomena, but as intertwined forces. Those who looked down on his mother for being Jewish were often the same who looked down on him for being Black. Their disdain, like their ignorance, was multipurpose.

In fiction, the trajectory of hate is often traced through the transformation—or dissolution—of individual characters. Edward Norton’s role in American History X captures the psychology of white supremacy, which begins with targeted rage and ends in indiscriminate violence. The skinhead protagonist initially targets Black people, but his ideology quickly grows to encompass Jews, Latinos, and others. As the character learns too late, the system of hate he helped build does not honor boundaries.

A similar arc unfolds in The Believer, a film based on the true story of Daniel Burros, a Jewish man who joined the American Nazi Party. The contradictions of Burros’s life dramatize the self-consuming nature of bigotry. Hatred, once set loose, eventually circles back to the self. When identity becomes a threat to ideology, ideology often wins.

These fictional accounts find resonance in nonfiction works like Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred, which tells the story of Derek Black, the son of white nationalist leaders who came to renounce the movement. Black’s transformation began not with abstract reasoning, but with personal relationships—with Jews, Muslims, and immigrants whose humanity punctured the ideological membrane that had encased him. His story demonstrates not only that hate can be unlearned, but that it is rarely compartmentalized. White nationalism, he came to understand, requires multiple scapegoats to survive.

Historical investigations confirm the pattern. Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews with ordinary Germans who supported Hitler, reveals a startling ordinariness to ideological hate. Antisemitism was a given, but it existed alongside fear of communists, suspicion of Catholics, contempt for intellectuals, and resentment of modernity itself. Nazi ideology did not merely single out Jews; it mobilized a hierarchy of hatred, binding its adherents together not by what they loved, but by whom they loathed.

Why does this happen? Cognitive scientists point to the brain’s preference for categories—especially when under threat. People primed to think in “us vs. them” terms often extend that thinking across different “thems.” It is psychologically efficient to bundle together those who are different and view them all as enemies. This cognitive shortcut, especially when reinforced by propaganda, becomes a durable political tool.

Social dynamics also play a role. Hate groups rarely restrict themselves to one cause. The rhetoric of exclusion is portable and easily adjusted. A rally against immigrants today may focus on Muslims tomorrow. A conspiracy theory about George Soros can morph into a diatribe about Black Lives Matter, or transgender youth, or the United Nations. The architecture of hate is modular.

For those who traffic in hate, this elasticity is a strength. But for those who fight against it—whether as activists, educators, or artists—understanding this pattern is crucial. Hatred is not a narrow phenomenon. It is expansive, adaptive, and deeply interconnected. Combatting it means recognizing its many faces, even when it speaks with only one voice.

In the United States, hate speaks with more than one voice, but there’s one that shouts out: that of our own President Donald Trump. And many of the other voices are from those who support him and his efforts to bring about a totalitarian society. Perversely, one of Trump’s talents is to turn facts on their head. For example, he has falsely attributed the rise of antisemitic violence in the country to Democrats generally and to his political opponents, never mindful of his own numerous associations with antisemites and hateful speech regarding immigrants, transgenders, gays, Muslims, Blacks, the disabled, women, and even veterans who aren’t heroes in his mind because they were made prisoners. In the wake of the recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, where a Jewish community gathering was targeted, Trump even pointed specifically to former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies as a contributing factor. 

In times of crisis, fear seeks a target. But hate is rarely satisfied with just one.