Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of ” Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics ” and the forthcoming ” Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. ” She co-hosts the history podcasts ” Past Present ” and ” This Day in Esoteric Political History .” The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN) In the aftermath of the Buffalo massacre, a note of despair has begun creeping into interviews with some experts on domestic extremism. Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News this week, “We’ve had too many wake-up calls at this point for me to feel confident that we’re going to suddenly change the current path that we are on.” Ben Collins, who covers extremism and disinformation for NBC News, explained to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow how right-wing media figures and politicians help mainstream extremist views, but also admitted, “I don’t know how to make people stop doing that.”

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