Matt Rourke/AP Photo
On Monday, investigators worked the scene of the supermarket shootings in Buffalo, New York.
Over the weekend, a young white man allegedly drove several hours to a supermarket in Buffalo, where he murdered ten people in cold blood, and wounded three more. He distributed an unhinged screed beforehand, describing himself as a Nazi and antisemite, and fulminating about critical race theory and the “great replacement,” or “white genocide,” conspiracy theory—which holds that a shadowy group of Jews (with George Soros as a common stand-in), liberals, and/or socialists are deliberately importing vast hordes of nonwhite immigrants to replace the white population and win elections. Thus his choice of target: a heavily Black neighborhood.
Replacement theory comes straight out of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, and it provided the motivation behind previous mass murders at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, in an El Paso Walmart, in two mosques in New Zealand, at a Norwegian youth summer camp, and many others.
Much of the follow-up coverage emphasized how the alleged killer’s beliefs are barely different from mainstream Republican rhetoric these days. While anti-immigration attitudes have been common in the party for many years, explicitly name-checking neo-Nazi theories was out of bounds until quite recently. Now you hear it all the time—in the Facebook ads of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third-ranking House Republican; in the writings of Ann Coulter; and above all on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
The conservative movement is on a road to genocide, if they aren’t stopped.
Among conservatives, there have been two kinds of reactions to the idea that their advocacy of virtually the same ideas as the alleged killer’s implicated them in his crimes. The first was the typical Trump-style shameless tantrum and refusal to admit any connection, much less culpability. Stefanik issued a snotty, outraged statement denying any responsibility, in which her spokesperson then accused Democrats of supporting “mass amnesty and voting rights for illegals.”
More ominous was the reaction from other quarters. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak tweeted that replacement theory was simply plausible:
And just hours after the shooting, Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters posted an interview reiterating a version of the theory:
For several decades now, and especially since the rise of Trump in 2015, Republicans have been embracing steadily more extreme rhetoric and politics. His whole presidency was a process of continually indulging their most irresponsible, gratuitous instincts and then gleefully doubling down when criticized for it. Thus Tucker Carlson posting a picture of himself with his trademark smug grin holding a copy of The New York Times where his show was described as possibly “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” As John Ganz writes, “The American Right is stuck in a cycle where it alienates public opinion through its strangeness, bitterness, and aggressiveness and then views that very alienation as evidence of the need to become even stranger and more bitter and more aggressive.”
This process explains how the Republican Party has become a happy home for Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who attends openly white supremacist and neo-Nazi gatherings. It’s why QAnon lunacy—which at bottom, despite many comically nutty decorative elements, is a fantasy of political mass murder—is basically bog-standard GOP messaging now.
I see no reason to think this process of radicalization will stop on its own. After all, the alleged shooter was just taking the conservative “replacement” rhetoric seriously. If one really believes that the white race is the foundation of American society (a disgusting lie in its own right), and that wealthy Jews and liberals are conspiring to drown that race in a tide of bestial subhuman immigrants, then mass murder is a logical conclusion—and, more importantly, one that is emotionally satisfying to the mindset of fascist degenerates. If whites are to preserve their demographic majority, it means boosting the white birth rate, or cutting down the nonwhite population, or both.
As more Fox and QAnon devotees take the implications of right-wing rhetoric seriously, and as previously fringe beliefs become party dogma, there will be steadily more pressure to embrace yet more extreme views so conservatives can distinguish themselves as true purist hard-liners. I fear that some version of “we must murder our political opponents” will be a Republican campaign slogan very soon.
It’s unfortunate that most Democrats seem constitutionally incapable of grasping the threat to the republic and quite possibly their own lives. Attorney General Merrick Garland is apparently twiddling his thumbs while January 6 putschists run for high office and Trump prepares to seize the presidency again, by force if necessary. We hear wimpy exhortations to vote while Republicans blatantly rig the institutions of states they control; we hear demands for progressive activists to shut up while conservatives indulge every lunatic whim of their base. Feckless, cowardly leadership like this only enables Republican extremism.
