Days ago the Notre-Dame de Paris caught fire during an ongoing renovation. The fire caused extensive damage and was reportedly caused by an electrical short circuit — although an investigation is ongoing. Around the same time, a white child named Landen Hoffman was grabbed and thrown from a Mall of America balcony by a black assailant named Emmanuel Aranda.

There is no evidence of arson at Notre Dame. And Emmanuel Aranda was not motivated by racism, but rather anger at women who rebuffed his advances. It was reported that Aranda, who was previously banned from the Mall of America, was initially looking to murder a random adult at the mall, but eventually settled on 5-year-old Landen.

Still, this hasn’t stopped white nationalists from hyping the incidents as an affront to white people everywhere.

In a comical on-air meltdown, white nationalist self-promoter Jason Köhne called Notre Dame a “symbol of our beauty, of our character” and said that “its burning, its holocaust is an example — a representation — of white erasure.” He complained that they “cannot even ask whether or not anti-white non-whites are behind this act” for fear of being censored by “anti-white bastards.”

Still, Köhne speculated that the disaster was somehow caused by women and non-whites. He explained that workers “were hired based on their gender and race rather than on their abilities,” and did not “foresee that a structure like this would have special needs to preserve it.” He added that the firefighters likewise failed to put out the flame because they had been hired because of their race, and not their abilities.

This is a laughable oversimplification, of course. As Greg Favre, a former St. Louis Fire Department captain, explained, a variety of factors meant that the cathedral fire was nearly impossible to put out. These factors included the height of the building, the materials used to build it, and its very design. There is no evidence to suggest Köhne’s theory is true.

Lacey Lynn, a white supremacist and fundamentalist Christian who routinely donates to Köhne’s show, read Rudyard Kipling’s “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon” — a poem popular among white nationalists. Citing Landen Hoffmann’s attempted murder by a “Somali invader” — along with the burning of Notre Dame — Lynn called on her listeners to feel “righteous anger.”

“Today is not the day to preach to fellow Christians about #NotAllMuslims or ‘not all anti-whites,'” she said. Instead she instructed them to tell Christians “something that they haven’t heard in decades,” which is that “righteous anger is completely okay, permissible, and even encouraged in Christianity.”

The April 15, 2019 episode of the Neo-Nazi podcast Goy Talk began with a dark, violent speech reminiscent of mass murderer Brenton Tarrant’s bloodthirsty manifesto. Goy Talk co-host Paddocksperg falsely claimed the attack on Hoffmann was “another anti-white hate crime,” and referred to Aranda as a “subhuman piece of death-deserving excrement who should never have been permitted to set his foot on American soil to begin with.”

He warned that if whites fail to “feel and act as if all of us are indeed truly a part of a great extended family as a race,” then they will “become a terminally infirm people” until they meet an “inevitable, torturous, and painful demise at the hands of those not even worthy to eat our shit.” He added that the “combined lives of every Somalian [sic] on Earth is not even worth half of one life of our European brothers and sisters.”

German James Woods, who co-hosts The Gas Station, said that it’s “time to start getting out of your comfort zone” and “start moving out into the street.” Goy Talk co-host Kaiser Peezy remarked that, “If you’re white this [burning of Notre Dame] is an attack on you, whether you realize it or not.” Later they hyped debunked conspiracy theories about the fire, including the claim that a Muslim man was spotted walking in the cathedral as it burned.

On Love Street, one of several white supremacist podcasts on The Right Stuff, Larry Ridgeway said he “spent the whole day today just boilin’, the blood boilin’ over between fires and kids gettin’ thrown over railings by fuckin’ niggers.” Ridgeway falsely called the attack on Hoffmann a “black-on-white hate crime.” His co-host Great Ape Niggy complained that black people “fucking shit on us and kill our kids and rape our women and shit.”

“This is exactly the reason why lynching used to exist,” Niggy added. “And I’m not gonna advocate anything illegal, but if people were to do some shit I wouldn’t fucking shed a single fucking tear.”

At the white supremacist media outlet Red Ice, hosts Henrik Palmgren and Lana Lokteff fretted over how Notre Dame will be rebuilt. Lokteff joked that it might end up with an “Islamic architectural something in it,” while Palmgren suggested Emmanuel Macron would replace it with a “Eurafrican Muslim temple.”

Naturally they too pushed conspiracies about the fire — and speculated that a worker on the roof might have deliberately set it ablaze.

Lokteff was clearly annoyed that conspiracy theories about Notre Dame had been dismissed so quickly. “But if it was a mosque or Jewish temple, even a Buddhist or a Hindu temple — anything but Christian or Pagan — it wouldn’t be a problem, you could question what happened, and if there was someone behind it. No problems,” she said.

Meanwhile, Mike Peinovich — the, shall we say, “brains” behind The Right Stuff and its flagship podcast The Daily Shoah — managed to say the quiet part loud on Twitter. “Let’s be honest,” he wrote, “All of us want this [fire] to have been a deliberate act by one of any number of evil groups that hate white people. That way at least it fits into a grand storyline, which in the future could include just retribution”

Richard Spencer also chimed in to suggest white supremacists exploit the disaster for their own personal gain. “If the Nortre Dame [sic] fire serves to spur the White man into action–to sieze power in his countries, in Europe, in the world–then it will have served a glorious purpose and we will one day bless this catastrophe,” he tweeted.