History denied will show up in dangerous actions: like evil racism and massacres

American Racism and the Buffalo Shooting
The gunman seems motivated by a vision of history, pushed by the right, in which American racism never existed and Black people are undeserving takers.

Echo report published in The New Yorker, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

On Saturday, in the parking lot of a neighborhood grocery store, an eighteen-year-old armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, the N-word emblazoned on its front sight, began shooting. 

Horrifying! Shots cracked in the air, piercing through an unusually warm eighty-degree spring afternoon in Buffalo, New York. The teen-ager, who was later identified by the police, donned military-esque camouflage, was draped in body armor, and wore a camera to capture his bloody rampage. When the shooting stopped, thirteen people had been hit, ten of them killed. Eleven of those shot were Black. The gunman was captured by the police when he left the grocery store, and, by late Saturday night, he was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder.

The shooter is alleged to have posted a hundred-and-eighty-page “manifesto” avowing white-supremacist beliefs. In the hate-filled text, he denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people. The notion that white people are being replaced has recently moved from the fringe of far-right politics to mainstream Republican Party politics. The Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has helped to popularize the ideology, and it has dovetailed seamlessly with the rhetoric of the Republican Party, which has insisted on describing the arrival of migrants at the southern border—seeking entry into the U.S. as asylum seekers—as an “invasion.”

The shooter rationalized his vicious attack by trying to fit it into this grand, esoteric conspiracy of white replacement through immigration. His manifesto, by contrast, is filled with crudely racist memes about Black Americans. In fact, for all his denunciation of “replacers” in the manifesto, an archive of his posts on the messaging platform Discord, from the past six months, barely mentions immigrants. Instead, he writes prolifically and disparagingly about Black people, whom he incessantly describes with racial slurs. In a search of archived posts beginning in 2021, the word “immigrant” appears twelve times, “replacement” eighteen times, “replacer” twenty-two times, but “blacks” and the N-word each appear a hundred times.

The manifesto seems intended to confer a sense of intellectual sophistication on his savage act. But the shooter’s Discord posts are full of sophomoric, even banal stereotypes about Black people—as genetically inferior, as predisposed to crime. The shooter claims inspiration from the white supremacist who murdered fifty-one worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. The Christchurch shooter also recorded his massacre and left a manifesto. But, for all of the Buffalo shooter’s professed inspiration from the Christchurch massacre, his actions seem to flow primarily from homegrown resentments. He searched by Zip Code for the largest Black population close to where he lived, in order to “kill as many blacks as possible.” His research led him to a grocery store, on the city’s East Side, along the Jefferson Avenue commercial corridor, running through the heart of Black Buffalo.

Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A recent report published by the C.D.C. showed that, from 2019 to 2020, the over-all homicide rate involving a firearm rose by nearly thirty-five per cent. The Buffalo massacre stands out not only because of the number of people killed but because of the political nature of the assault. This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S. If Dylann Roof, the white racist who killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015, helped to inaugurate the racial grievance at the core of the Trump Presidency, then the Buffalo shooter’s killing spree may be emblematic of its still rippling effects. Roof, whom the Buffalo shooter acknowledges in his manifesto as a “freedom fighter,” also penned a manifesto full of deranged ideas, linking Black crime with the decline of white life in the U.S.

"At least 25 were injured when 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator went on a shooting rampage in Midland-Odessa. Ator was gunned down by police during a standoff outside a movie theater."

In his manifesto, the Buffalo shooter writes, “Blacks are the most privileged race in the US and many western countries. But yet they say they are the most oppressed. What other race is given trillions of dollars of White taxpayer money to succeed, but yet fails and asks for more? What other race actively destroys their communities like they do?” The comments do not sound very different from those made by former President Trump, who tweeted in the summer of 2019, of the late African American congressman Elijah Cummings’s majority-Black Baltimore district, “Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen?” and “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

Trump coddled avowed white supremacists during his Presidency, and his open stoking of racial animus unshackled the Republican Party from norms long held in mainstream politics. One day prior to Roof’s mass murder, Trump announced his candidacy for President in New York City and called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, screaming “Jews will not replace us,” Trump claimed that some of the demagogues were “very fine people.” Before the Christchurch shooter carried out his massacre, in 2019, he hailed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” The President called the attack “horrible” but downplayed the threat of white nationalism in the same breath. Throughout 2020, as historic protests against racism unfolded, and an election loomed, the Republican Party continued to court its right-wing fringe. Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse menaced a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin; armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two unarmed men; and overnight became a celebrity within the Republican Party. Trump defended Rittenhouse; Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, also refused to condemn him. Rittenhouse was eventually acquitted of first-degree-homicide charges, last November, and remains a hero on the right. During the assault on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021, extremists and the mainstream Republican Party came together in an act of violence intended to overturn the results of the election. This marked a dangerous turning point in U.S. politics, when it became clear that, for the right, anything was on the table when it came to preserving political power.

As the protests of 2020, receded into the background, Republicans went on the offensive. One of Trump’s last initiatives in office was the formation of the 1776 Commission, undertaken as a rebuke to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. “The crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country,” he said. This has since evolved into a generalized strategy, intended to shift the conversation away from systemic racism, voting rights, and police reform, and toward a fight over critical race theory. 

As the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute, put it:

We’ve needed new language for these issues. . . . “Political correctness” is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. . . . It’s much more invasive than mere “correctness,” which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: “cancel culture” is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; “woke” is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. “Critical race theory” is the perfect villain.

This effort was largely successful in shifting attention away from the patterns of deep-seated racism revealed by the pandemic and by the brutal public lynching of George Floyd. 

Instead, there has been a frenzy of legislation sharply limiting the ways that slavery, and other aspects of America’s racist history, can be discussed in schools—or whether they can be discussed at all. According to Education Week, seventeen states have signed into law bans or restrictions on teaching “critical race theory” or racism and sexism, and twelve more are considering such legislation. 

There have also been efforts to ban books, such as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” and, the Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones’s work, the 1619 Project. 

School-board meetings have turned into forums for political theatre that emphasizes the grievance of white parents and denies the realities of racial discrimination. This spring, Florida’s governor, (aka #stupidRon) Ron DeSantis, signed into law the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (woke) Act, which restricts the ways that businesses and public schools, including universities, can train or teach about racism, in order to avoid exposing white people to feelings of guilt. This effort has been bolstered by the enthusiasm of a new generation of right-wing officials, including Representative Paul Gosar, of Arizona, who attended a February gathering of white nationalists, and Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona who promotes the idea that white people are being replaced and recently insinuated that the Buffalo massacre was a “false flag” event, instigated by federal agents.

These collective efforts have made a mockery of public conversations about the history of American racism and xenophobia—and, in some contexts, have made them all but impossible. Discussions of America’s racist history lend important insights into the patterns of poverty, unemployment, and social deprivation that exist today. They underlie the arguments for the creation or expansion of public programs intended to alleviate racial exclusion. Without this context—evaded even by some liberals afraid of being tagged as favoring “big government” and actively suppressed by the right—the Buffalo shooter’s notion, rendered euphemistically in mainstream Republican discourse, that Black people are undeserving takers, becomes a kind of common sense.

For years, law enforcement and academia have searched for potential patterns when it comes to trying to identify people likely to carry out a mass shooting.

These national political machinations have local repercussions. The neighborhood where the shooting took place, Masten, is overwhelmingly Black, with many people living below the poverty line. I spoke with Pastor George F. Nicholas, of the Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church, which is situated in the area. “I had two families that were directly impacted by what happened yesterday,” he said. “And I let those family members share. And then others who, unbeknownst to me, had friends or people who they were connected to that lost their lives yesterday. They shared, and then I just gave people the moment of opportunity to talk about what they were going through. . . . Many people were angry. That was a big sentiment. Angry that it happened. Angry that it didn’t have to happen. Angry at the ability of our society to really, fully comprehend or to acknowledge the historical roots that drive these things.” He saw the violence as a continuation of the broader disenfranchisement that Black people in Masten experience. “The high poverty rates, the poor health outcomes or academic outcomes don’t just happen. Those are the direct results of policy decisions and investment decisions that have been made. And, you know, if communities are not perceived as having much value, and the people who live in them are perceived as not having much value . . .”

Nicholas’s voice trailed off, but the point was clear. For decades, Black life has been seen as disposable. Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in the nation, and the poverty is concentrated in the neighborhoods with the largest Black populations. Racism there comes not only in the form of a teen-age white supremacist murdering Black people at a grocery store. It is also evident in the policies that encourage disinvestment from public schools attended by Black students, in the annual failure to develop affordable-housing policies, and in the continued use of fees and fines that disproportionately impact Black residents. At a vigil on Sunday near the site of the massacre, hundreds gathered to honor the dead. The Reverend Denise Walden-Glenn spoke to the crowd and implored them to go beyond decrying this racist attack to address these long-standing inequities in Black Buffalo. “It was an eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boy who came up here, and his heart was so full of hate that he came to kill us,” she told the crowd. “Someone knew enough to enter the one store that we have here to shatter our world and devastate our community. While we are talking about increasing the police budget by $5.4 million, we need to talk about where to invest that money into our communities and our people.”

The conservative hysteria that seeks to envelop American history in a shroud of innocence and ignorance—and thus refuses to acknowledge the roots of racial inequality, residential segregation, underemployment—is a convenient justification for never having to use the power of the state to address these issues. It also perpetuates the delusion that segregation is a choice and that Black neighborhoods suffer greater inequities because of something intrinsic to the people who live in these communities. This is not just wrong; it is dangerous. And, on an otherwise warm Saturday afternoon, a shooter stepped out of the darkness and showed us what happens when we continue to hide from our history.

Protect human lives: End gun violence!

Sick of Gun Massacres? Get Rid of the Guns.

The New York Times opinion echo by op-ed columnist Gail Collins

How long does it take to get over a mass shooting?

Well, for the families and friends of victims of the Buffalo supermarket disaster, where 10 people were killed by an 18 year old gunman with a semiautomatic rifle, obviously forever. 

But,  when it comes to the rest of the country, one man who ought to know says the public has already started to move on.

(HELLO! Gun control is a pro-life issue!)

“That’s the pattern,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “Despite gun violence rates going through the roof, the country only pays attention when there’s a mass shooting, and then the country only pays attention for 24 to 48 hours.”

Murphy was formerly the congressman from the district where 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 children, with a semiautomatic rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Murphy later moved on to the Senate, where in 2016 he staged an old-school filibuster, speaking for over 14 hours to protest the fact that his colleagues weren’t planning to do anything after the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 49 in Florida.

The gunman at the Pulse nightclub used a semiautomatic rifle.

Ahhh? Can we a pattern here, anybody? And what do you think we should do about it?

A) Toughen background check laws
B) Limit the sale of semiautomatics to people with hunting licenses
C) Good Lord, just get rid of them

Yeah, C does simplify things, doesn’t it? 

Especially, after we learned that Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old suspect in the Buffalo shooting, had been able to buy an AR-15-style assault rifle with just a little more effort than it’d take to buy a burrito, inquiring minds wanted to know why.

It turns out that in many states, semiautomatic rifles are basically regarded as weapons of sport — the kind of thing you’d use to go hunting deer or target shooting.

“The industry has gone to an extreme effort to argue it’s a needed hunting gun. I think they doth protest too much,” said Ryan Busse, a former executive in the gun industry who’s now become a critic. (A memoir of his transformation, “Gunfight,” was published last year.)

Claiming that you need a semiautomatic rifle for hunting, Busse said, is like arguing that you need a Formula One racecar to go shopping. “There’s a lot of safer and more effective ways to get to the stores.”

Congress did indeed ban semiautomatic rifles in 1994, in a law with a 10-year expiration date. After the ban expired, the number of mass shootings increased. And Congress responded by … pretty much ignoring the matter completely. Hey, the Republicans had taken control.

Same thing now, of course. Nobody believes anything as controversial as banning semiautomatic rifles is going to get through the current Senate. 

President Joe Biden would love to take action, but he hasn’t come up with anything more dramatic than nominating a permanent director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A permanent director would be a post-Trump triumph. But not exactly the goal we had in mind.

Guns like the infamous semiautomatic AR-15 aren’t really needed for sport. (OK, we might permit an exemption for the folks down South who need to cut back on the herds of very speedy 300-pound wild pigs.)


In Connecticut, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, Murphy says tons of his constituents hunt and he never hears complaints about their inability to mow down deer without a rapid-fire rifle.

In some ways, the assault rifle is now a symbol on both sides. “The AR-15 to most people in the firearms industry — it’s a statement. It’s a middle finger,” said Busse, who noted that during the Jan. 6 charge on the Capitol there were AR-15 “Come and Take It” flags waving.

And the ban-that-rifle corps has to admit that getting rid of assault rifles won’t solve the gun problem as long as people in many states are allowed to own pistols and carry them when they stroll about the town.

(We will pause here to recall that the Supreme Court is reviewing New York’s law prohibiting people from toting handguns around without a compelling reason. Any jurist who vents about the sanctity of human life during abortion cases had better examine his or her conscience before ruling in that one.)

The get-up Gendron was wearing — body armor, video equipment attached to a helmet — is becoming more common. A sign of the times, I guess. Fifteen years ago, Busse notes, the firearms industry wouldn’t have allowed gear like that to be displayed at its trade shows. “But if you go there today, the marketing campaigns are terrific,” he said, adding he’s also run into “the most frightening video games you’ve ever been in.”

We are not going to devolve into a discussion about how everything’s getting worse. Really, people, everything can’t be worse about everything. Let’s think positive, and if you want to get attention, a simple battle is the best bet.

Get rid of assault rifles. All assault rifles. Ban them. Hunters can work on becoming better shots. The gun industry can diversify — and maybe start marketing swords and medieval knight costumes at its trade shows. I know swords can do a lot of damage, but we live in an age when one victim at a time would definitely be progress.

End evil white supremacy

The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ 

Rather, he’s a Mainstream Republican
Echo report published in Rolling Stone Magazine

By Talia Lavin

Mass shooter "lone wolf" crime scene

The right-wing extremists who control the modern GOP are all gripped by a racist delusion. The shooter is just the latest to act on it.

There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.

Five years ago, when white supremacists walked down the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and carrying tiki torches, few people understood their intent – the fact that they were referring to replacement theory. The idea seemed outlandish, even incomprehensible; at the time, it was a fairly obscure rallying cry, based around a 2012 book by French novelist Renaud Camus fear mongering about a nonwhite-majority Europe, absorbed into the fetid stew of white-supremacist cant, where it acquired a vicious antisemitism. For many white supremacists, it is Jews who are orchestrating the “reverse colonization,” as Camus put it, of white countries, in order to more easily manipulate a nonwhite and therefore more malleable general populace. 

In Gendron’s manifesto, after explaining in detail why he picked the particular supermarket he did — it was in a majority-Black neighborhood with a majority-Black clientele — he felt the need to explain why he did not choose to attack Jews. “[Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now, it is a matter of survival we destroy them first,” he wrote, before listing his weaponry in detail with price points included — a manual for future murders. While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of “elites,” “Democrats” and “globalists,” his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual. The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.

The demographics of the United States are changing, and the share of the population considered white is shrinking. This change is occurring faster than anticipated, thanks to the relative ages of white and nonwhite populations in the country — the nonwhite population trends significantly younger — and all national population growth is being driven by nonwhite groups, according to an analysis by Brookings. This confluence of death, birth, and immigration is in and of itself morally neutral, a matter of the natural ebb and flow of populations over time. But as the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic.

Donald Trump’s ascendance was a key marker of the force of white racial panic; from the moment he launched his candidacy, his overt racism set the party’s agenda, and from the very first, his rhetoric directly provoked racist violence. Far from ebbing as Trump has ceased to be the party’s sole center, however, the tide of white animus has become even more central to a new crop of Congress people and candidates.

The Republican Party’s embrace of nativism has been more of a full-on dash than a slow slide, and it has been catalyzed by the vast constellation of right-wing media. Chief among these is the juggernaut that is Fox News. 

As a New York Times analysis revealed, the network’s flagship prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has an obsession with replacement theory: In more than 400 shows the newspaper analyzed, Carlson evoked the idea of forced demographic change through immigration and other methods. Carlson is not alone: A Media Matters examination of Fox’s rhetoric throughout 2021 found that the network fulsomely embraced replacement theory, or, as it is more commonly known among extremists, “white genocide.” Such fears have become commonplace campaign talking points among Republican candidates: Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance recently declared that Democrats are “bringing in a large number of new voters to replace those that are already here”; in Arizona, far-right state senator Wendy Rogers responded to an article about migrants with the ominous message, “We are being replaced and invaded.” Just hours after the mass shooting in Buffalo, Senate candidate Blake Masters posted a video appearance in which he declared that Democrats’ electoral strategy involves bringing in “millions” of immigrants to vote for them. 

(#STUPIDMTG) Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene rode extremism into Congress, long after sharing a video that declared that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation, with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” This clamor — from politicians and pundits, candidates and conspiracy theorists — has become the radioactive center of the right’s policy.

Once you understand an obsession with racial composition and white fertility to be the driving engine of Republican politics, a number of seemingly disparate movements begin to fit together into an ugly whole. Some aspects are obvious: The anti-immigrant movement that has seen U.S. refugee admissions at historic lows and asylum seekers marooned in purgatorial camps in Mexico continues to dominate the right-wing airwaves. Historic levels of gerrymandering are ensuring that a diversifying populace remains beholden to the views of a white minority — alongside openly antidemocratic restrictions on voting and changes in election administration.

Other aspects are more veiled, but no less vitriolic. Years of fearmongering about transgender rights, and in particular their influence on youth, are linked to fears of waning fertility: anti-trans demagogues like Abigail Shrier describe trans bodies as “maimed and sterile,” and, as such, a chief motivation for the legion of anti-trans laws passed by state legislatures is the future fertility of trans children born female. The violent antifeminism of a far-right movement that sees women principally as vessels for breeding a new white generation expresses itself in a fixation on a return to “traditional” gender roles. 

And the culmination of generations of right-wing activism, which will secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito memorably put it, is poised to arrive in the form of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. Payton Gendron, and those like him, are listening: like Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron opened his manifesto with a screed on the supposedly apocalyptic consequences of “sub-replacement fertility rates” among white women.

In his manifesto, Gendron claims to have acted alone, while in the same breath admitting, “I’ve had many influences from others.” The 180 pages of the document reveal the breadth of those influences: it is largely pastiche, with page upon page of racist and antisemitic memes compiled in repulsive collages; collections of scientific studies of I.Q. differentials between racist groups; screenshots and links to news articles that confirm his prejudices; and segments of other manifestos, including Tarrant’s, bloat a thin line of racist scrawl. He may have, as he claims, become radicalized by over-enthused browsing of the Internet’s sewers, principally 4chan. But his fixations mirror those of the right wing more broadly, from violent transphobia to a loathing of immigration to a preoccupation with the possibility of civil war.

When the rhetoric of an entire movement devolves into Manichaean demonization of their political foes; when demographic shifts are represented as apocalyptic; and when a party can appeal to nothing but the consolidation of white power, it is an inevitability that such rhetoric will leave bodies in its wake. The Republican Party caters chiefly now to those who claim that to be born the wrong color is an act of genocide, and act with appropriate fervor. 

There has never been a lone wolf when it comes to racist terror in the United States; it suffuses every aspect of our politics and policy, and in latter years the mass howl of fear at change comes from a jaw that drips with blood. As long as we fail to recognize the wellspring of racial animus that animates the right wing in this country, the corpses will continue to accrue.

Guns massacre and terrorize innocent victims: Guns kill people

"American life is punctuated by mass shootings that are routinely described as idiosyncratic. But these attacks are not random acts; they are part of the long American history of political violence perpetrated by white supremacists against Black people and other minority groups," The New York Times editorial board.

The Buffalo Massacre Was Not a Random Act of Violence

Opinion echo published by The New York Times editorial board:

By The Editorial Board: The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Guns kill people!

Republican politicians, including some of the party’s top leaders, openly espouse versions of a white supremacist conspiracy theory holding that an orchestrated effort is underway to displace white Americans. A recently published poll found that almost half of Republicans believe that immigrants are being brought to the United States as part of such an effort.

On Saturday, a gunman who said he was motivated by a version of this “replacement theory” killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store, officials said. The suspect, identified as Payton S. Gendron, wrote in an online diatribe that he sought to kill Black people because he wanted to prevent white people from losing their rightful control of the country.

Mr. Gendron described himself as part of a movement. He said that he was inspired by similar attacks on other minority communities and that he hoped others would follow his example. The suspects in several mass killings in recent years, including the 2015 murder of nine Black worshipers at a church in Charleston, S.C.; the 2018 murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; the 2019 murder of 51 Muslim worshipers at a pair of mosques in New Zealand; and the 2019 murder of 23 people, many Latino, in El Paso also propounded versions of this racist worldview.

American life is punctuated by mass shootings that are routinely described as idiosyncratic. But these attacks are not random acts; they are part of the long American history of political violence perpetrated by white supremacists against Black people and other minority groups.

Politicians who have employed some of the vocabulary of #evil replacement theory generally do not make explicit calls for violence. The office of one of those politicians, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, said in a statement that the Buffalo attack was an “act of evil” and that she “has never advocated for any racist position.”

(Hello? Was Elise Stefanik abducted by aliens? Voters want to know!)

UFOs are real, and they have abducted Elise Stefanik

But, the matter is dangerously not so simple.

Mass shootings do not fit one profile - they are complicated.

Replacement theory is an attack on democracy. It privileges the purported interests of some Americans over those of others, asserting, in effect, that the will of the people means the will of white people. It rekindles fears and resentments among white Americans that cynical practitioners of American politics have stoked throughout the nation’s history. It also provides a disturbing rationalization for people inclined to resort to violence when the political process does not deliver what they want or protect what they see as their place in society.

The Fox News host Tucker (aka #Schmucker) Carlson, a leading purveyor of #evil replacement theory rhetoric, has promoted the idea that elites are seeking to replace white Americans on more than 400 episodes of his #fakenews program, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Opinion letters published in The New York Times from readers:

Buffalo New York massacre!  

After yet another horrific mass shooting, there will be the usual calls for common-sense gun control measures, most of which will regrettably fall on deaf ears because of the partisan politics that surround the Second Amendment. However, there is a deeper, darker and more disturbing issue that warrants just as much attention as the prospect of stronger gun regulations.

Racism and religious intolerance are fueling a wave of deadly violence in America that foreshadows more troubling times ahead. Black people are being attacked solely because they are Black, Jews are being targeted just because they are Jewish, and Asian Americans and Muslim Americans are being assaulted simply because of their race and religion. This systematic xenophobia and barefaced bigotry are patently un-American and antithetical to the democratic ideals upon which this nation was built, and they pose one of the biggest threats to our republic.

As a society and as a nation, we need to place as much of an emphasis on curbing the rabid racism that drives people to target and terrorize people based on their race or ethnicity, as we do on ending the mass shootings that ensue.

“Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world,” Mr. Carlson said on an episode in April 2021. 

“But they become hysterical because that’s —that’s what’s happening, actually.” Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, later tweeted that Mr. Carlson “is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America.”

In September, Ms. Stefanik’s (aka GOP's Lady Macbeth) re-election campaign paid for a Facebook ad that combined imagery of immigrants with the accusation that “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” Ms. Stefanik’s ad continued, “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington. 

Right-wing rhetoricians in the United States portray undocumented immigrants as the primary threat. This sanitizes replacement theory for mainstream consumption without diluting its logic. The same argument is easily applied to other minority groups.

Renaud Camus was the French writer that coined the term “the great replacement”, in a 2011, book to describe what he saw as a conscious effort by French elites to open the country’s doors for Muslim immigrants to replace the ethnically French population and culture.

The template has been adapted for use by extremists around the world. Mr. Gendron wrote that he blamed Jews for orchestrating the replacement of white Americans. He copied large portions of his manifesto from the document posted to justify the New Zealand killings, in some cases inserting the name of the Jewish philanthropist George Soros in place of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s name. The manifesto posted by the El Paso shooting suspect, which Mr. Gendron also referenced, spoke of the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The common thread — the ineluctable core of replacement theory — is that some people are white and some people are not, and the people who are white are threatened by those who are not

It must also be emphasized that the United States makes it easy for domestic terrorists to kill. The police said that the Buffalo assailant used a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that he had purchased legally at a gun shop near his hometown. As a practical matter, almost anyone can buy guns that are designed to kill a lot of people quickly. The only real line of defense is the judgment of the people who sell guns. “He didn’t stand out — because if he did, I would’ve never sold him the gun,” Robert Donald, the store’s owner, told The New York Times.

The focus on the gunman’s motives should not obscure the fact that the most important step the government can take to impede similar attacks is to limit the availability of guns.

It must also be emphasized that the United States makes it easy for domestic terrorists to kill. The police said that the Buffalo assailant used a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that he had purchased legally at a gun shop near his hometown. As a practical matter, almost anyone can buy guns that are designed to kill a lot of people quickly. The only real line of defense is the judgment of the people who sell guns. “He didn’t stand out — because if he did, I would’ve never sold him the gun,” Robert Donald, the store’s owner, told The New York Times.

The focus on the gunman’s motives should not obscure the fact that
the most important step the government can take to impede similar attacks is to limit the availability of guns.

American democracy also requires the constructive use of free speech, especially by the nation’s political leaders. There are always demagogues whose stock in trade is the #evil demonization of immigrants and other minority groups, and American society has long allowed those on the fringes to air their views. The question in any era is whether such views are voiced, or echoed, by those in positions of responsibility.

It is telling that House Republicans last year installed Ms. Stefanik in leadership to replace (the brave) Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who remains among the most forthright critics of the party’s illiberal (right wing!) turn.

https://twitter.com/Liz_Cheney/status/1526159124840558592

Opinion echo letter to the editor:

To The New York Times Editor:

To all who defend the right to bear arms, please tell me again how that is more important than the lives just lost in Buffalo and Laguna Woods, Calif., or in Sandy Hook and Parkland, and on and on and on …

This is not a rational argument and I just can’t get emotional about a gun, but I can get very emotional about the 6- and 7-year-olds lost at Sandy Hook, or the high school students in Parkland, or the mature and elderly elsewhere.

“When will we ever learn?” Or won’t we?

Judith Rudikoff
Bridgeport, Connecticut

Racism and religious intolerance are fueling a wave of deadly violence in America that foreshadows more troubling times ahead. Black people are being attacked solely because they are Black, Jews are being targeted just because they are Jewish, and Asian Americans and Muslim Americans are being assaulted simply because of their race and religion.

N. Aaron Troodler
Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

An immigration history - 80 years after World War II

Published in MichiganLive.com by Julie Mack

On WWII 80th anniversary, the story of one Jewish family caught in winds of war. "After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps."

The photograph was in our living room for years: A family portrait of my husband’s grandmother and her family.

It was taken around 1907 in Austria. It shows a prosperous Jewish couple, Simon and Klara Sommer, surrounded by their 11 children, most of them adults. The second-youngest in the photo is Laura Sommer, my husband’s grandmother. She was about 20 at the time.

Laura Sommer went onto to marry Erich Beu, a German and a Christian. Their oldest son, my husband’s father, was born in Vienna. In the early 1920s, the family emigrated to Buffalo, N.Y.

Erich and Laura Beu lived the rest of their lives in Buffalo, where Erich joined a German-American club and Laura eventually joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. The couple had another son. A professional musician, Erich was a founding member of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its first concertmaster.

Laura’s Jewish heritage was rarely referenced, say my husband and his two sisters. Growing up, they heard a few vague references to relatives killed in the Holocaust, but no details.

But I wondered.

Recently, with the help of ancestry.com and a Holocaust victim database, I dug into the family mystery: What happened to Laura Sommer’s family during World War II?

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s start. And as I discovered, the Sommers were among the millions caught up in the Jewish genocide.

By 1939, Simon and Klara had passed away and Laura was one of 10 surviving Sommer siblings, agees 63 to 45.

Two were in Buffalo: Laura and her brother Emil. But for those still in Austria, things got rough.

After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Jews were forced to sell their property at ridiculously low prices. Some Jews fled the country. Others were deported to concentration camps.

By the end of 1938, the Sommers’ hometown of Amstettan, about 80 miles west of Vienna, was declared to be “Judenrien” or free of Jews, according to historical accounts.

One of the Sommer siblings, Sofie, went to Finland with her two sons in 1938. A brother, Richard, fled to Palestine.

Then there was Hugo, his wife Trudy, and their daughter Edith. My husband remembers meeting Hugo as a child. What he didn’t know was the family’s frantic scramble to leave Austria.

Edith came first in July 1938, alone as a 9-year-old on a ship sailing from France to New York City, ending up in Buffalo. Hugo and Trudy followed in November 1939 on separate ships -- Hugo leaving from Belgium and Trudy from Italy, a sign of the chaos descending on Europe. The family regrouped in Buffalo, moving in with Emil and his wife.

The other five Sommer siblings weren’t so lucky.

Ludwig was killed by Nazis in Vienna in April 1939. Arthur and Sigmund died in camps in Poland.

Friederike, the oldest sister, had married a Hungarian and was living in Romania. The couple survived the war but had a son killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. Maxmillian, the second oldest brother, also survived; his name shows up in records as a war refugee resettled in Linz, Austria.

As her siblings were caught up in the horror of World War II, Erich and Laura were living in Buffalo within walking distance of Emil and Hugo. Karl, my husband’s father, was 18 at the start of the war in 1939.

Surely, the Beu family heard first-hand from Hugo and Trudy about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, and the threat facing those still in Austria. Surely, the drip-drip-drip of bad news from family members during the war years must have packed an emotional wallop.

We don’t how Laura and Erich and their sons processed what was happening. Were they horrified by Hitler? Or was it more complicated than that? Did Erich feel loyalty towards his German homeland? Did Laura distance herself from her Jewish roots amid the era’s anti-Semitism?

Can we read anything into the fact that Erich continued to belong to a German-American club? That my husband and his sisters never knew they had a Great Uncle Emil in Buffalo? Emil and Laura obviously were very close at one point. Emil and his wife brought the Beus to America. Emil named his daughter Laura; Laura give her son the middle name of Emil. Yet until I asked, my husband and his sisters had never heard of Emil Sommer. They also hadn’t heard of their Great Aunt Sofie, even though she moved to the United States after the war and spent her last years in Buffalo.

The fact is, my husband says, his grandmother and father never talked about the past. There was no talk about World War II. There was no explanation of how Laura lost three brothers and a nephew to the Nazis. Maybe that’s to be expected. The Beus were a reserved family, not given to introspection. And many, many people impacted by the war found it too painful to discuss.

But my husband now wonders: Did the family’s connection to the Holocaust affect his father? A brilliant physicist, Karl Beu suffered throughout his adult life from major depression. He died of suicide in 1968. Karl’s brother also was hospitalized with depression.

Laura Sommer lived until 1988, past her 100th birthday. Her grandchildren recall her as a stern woman with a heavy German accent. “She wasn’t very pleasant,” recalls my husband. How did the war and the Holocaust change her?

Eighty wars ago on September 1, Hitler started a war that changed the course of history. It’s only now family members are exploring their personal connection to the Holocaust, and mulling how it might have shaped their lives, too.

CNN- German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has asked for Poland's forgiveness 80 years after the start of World War II.
"I stand before you, those who have survived, before the descendants of the victims, the old and the young residents of Wielun, I am humbled and grateful," Steinmeier said during a ceremony in the Polish city of Wielun, the site of one of the first Nazi bombings in the country on September 1, 1939.

Detestable Donald Trump- a New York echo opinion

An echo opinion letter published in The Buffalo News, a New York state newspaper.

An echo opinion published in The Buffalo News:

As the (#fake) “leader” of the free world and (presumably) the most powerful man in the western hemisphere, (the stupid!) Donald Trump has an obligation and responsibility to set an elevated example of morality and principle, while representing and defending the broad diversity of these United States.

Instead, he plays to the most detestable and base aspects of our societal flaws.

He fortifies and encourages the worst characteristics of our human nature to divide, separate and isolate while he promotes xenophobia and intolerance.

Regardless of how well the economy may be doing for some, or how low the unemployment rate may be (thank you President Barack Obama), overtly telling over ten thousand lies within the past two years is unconscionable, and economic well-being in no way justifies his excessive indiscretions.

I am far from alone in my concern that if the heat and pressure continue to back him into a corner and the prospects for impeachment or removal from office loom heavier and more plausible, there is little doubt that he will resort to creating a military conflict (Iran looking most probable right now) to divert the attention away from him.

If Obama had been alleged of doing any one of the things Trump has been queried of doing Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and the Republican leadership would have to be tied down and tranquilized for fear of them injuring themselves in spasms of uncontrolled indignation.

The (the 21st century version of the right wing GOP KuKluxKlan...) Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Marc Theissens of the world can only hope to reduce the severity of his reckless image and his influence on the office of the presidency and our Democracy using their hollow propaganda and jargon to reach the simplest of minds in the voting public; fortunately, most of us recognize skewed partisan fabrications when we hear them.

Just as the outcome of the 2018 election was pivotal, the 2020 election results will be crucial!

I don’t want to think that the America I grew up believing in and honoring was just a transitory illusion vulnerable to the destructive capabilities of a misguided, prejudiced and greedy megalomaniac. (In other words, Vote Blue no matter who!)

James Galbo from Buffalo, New York

In MaineWriter opinion, Donald Trump is a #fake_potus!