Once again, that most American of nightmares known as a mass shooting struck once more with terrible force on Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo NY with 10 people shot dead.
We could stop right there and have a story of sufficient tragedy and horror for anyone with a modicum of decency to recoil in shock.
But then we start peeling away at the particulars and it just gets worse.
The supermarket was in a predominantly black neighborhood and most of the dead victims are black.
We know who did it: 18 year old Payton S. Gendron.
And we know why he did it because Gendron was helpful enough to spell out his motives in his 180 page manifesto that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by people of color by immigration, interracial marriage and eventually violence.
Gendron is referencing a long simmering right wing “great replacement” conspiracy theory. For the particulars of which, you don't have to dig deep into the dark web. No, it's right there on national television on any given weeknight in Tucker Carlson's show.
Gendron's manifesto references “racial replacement” and “white genocide”. The first page of his manifesto includes a symbol known as the sonnenrad, or black sun. This symbol was once used by German Nazis but has been dusted off by white supremacist neo-Nazis.
Anyone who has seen the hate filled comments on a black actor being cast as Robert April in Star Trek or a black actor as the new Doctor Who knows these small minded, hate mongering people exist.
And tragically there are those who are prepared to express their small minded, hate mongering bigotry through the barrel of a gun.
And where pray tell could small minded, hate mongering like Payton Gendron be getting their damnable inspiration?
The “great replacement” rhetoric has moved from extreme-right belief toward the mainstream with outright support on right-wing TV pundits like Tucker Carlson.
Carlson repeatedly warns of invasions of “illegals” and has insisted that President Joe Biden wants to “change the racial mix” of the nation.
Media Matters reported that Carlson launched a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.”
The conspiracy has been cited as motivation in several racist mass shootings such as the murder of 20 people in an El Paso store in 2019 and the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
About 60% of extremist murders in the U.S. between 2009 and 2019 were committed by people espousing white supremacist ideologies like the replacement theory.
Whatever the reason, 10 people are dead in Buffalo who didn't need to be because some idiot with a gun decided to express himself with bullets.
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