Monday, May 16, 2022

Buffalo Mass Shooter's Manifesto Repeats The Neo-Nazi Beliefs That Republicans and Fox Have Brought To The US Political Mainstream (And Are Continually Repeating)

Which of the following two statements was uttered by Fox's Tucker Carlson? And which statement was in the manifesto posted by Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who murdered 10 people (and injured three others) at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on Saturday.

Statement #1:

How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don't know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?

Do you get along better with your neighbors, your co-workers if you can't understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.

Statement #2:

Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum "diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength...". Said throughout the media, spoken by politicians, educators and celebrities. But no one ever seems to give a reason why.

What gives a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength? What part of diversity causes this increase in strength? No one can give an answer.

Hard to say, isn't it? The two statements are basically identical.

Tucker Carlson has been pumping out Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, Ku Kux Klan propaganda nearly non-stop for several years. At the same time, he has been urging his viewers to take action, whipping his followers into an angry, violent mob. As Media Matters' Justin Horowitz reported:
Carlson has spent the last year embracing and mainstreaming white nationalist talking points, including the "great replacement" theory, while receiving praise from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and extremist Infowars host Alex Jones, among other white nationalists.

Over the weekend, a racially motivated and deadly mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket ended with 10 fatalities. The suspect in the mass shooting allegedly wrote a hateful manifesto that repeatedly cited the "great replacement" theory as a motive for violence against Black people. . . .

The Buffalo shooting was not the first to be inspired by the great replacement and other white nationalist theories. A 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, was motivated by the idea of a "white genocide." Some of the 2017 "Unite the Right" rallygoers in Charlottesville, North Carolina, were also galvanized by the idea.
Even as the shooting was happening in Buffalo (one of five mass shootings last weekend), attendees at a Donald Trump rally in Austin, Texas, were told by one guest speaker that it would be great if they "went out and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists."

On Carlson's first show since the mass shooting in Buffalo, he did not mention the "great replacement" theory (because he's a coward who won't stand behind his beliefs). Instead, he played the victim, claiming that the "ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership" want to silence powerful truthtellers like himself. Oh, and he lied and lied and lied. A few examples:
What is hate speech? Speech that our leaders hate. Because one mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That is what they are telling you. That is what they wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday's massacre gives the pretext and justification.
Neo-Nazis LOVE Tucker Carlson. Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, gushes that Carlson "literally our greatest ally" because he explains and promotes white supremacy in a simple package that the general public can easily understand.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte writes about the "great replacement" theory:
This particular paranoid hypothesis is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi and other white nationalist circles. A cabal of rich Jewish people, the theory holds, has conspired to "replace" white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control. Carlson doesn't actually say "Jews," and generally blames the sinister plan on Democrats, socialists or unspecified "elites," but otherwise has kept the conspiracy theory intact. (Antisemitism remains the mix by singling out individual Jewish people especially [George] Soros, as the alleged ringleaders.) It's not like Carlson only invokes this narrative on occasion. As Media Matters researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez has documented, Carlson is obsessed with this idea that the people he calls "legacy Americans" — a not-so-veiled euphemism for white Christians of European ancestry — are under siege from shadowy forces flying the banner of diversity. He uses anodyne terms like "demographic change" to make the point, but has gotten bolder more recently, using the word "replacement" to make it even clearer that he's borrowing his ideas from the white-supremacist fringe. . . .

Carlson has also explicitly linked this conspiracy theory to the threat of violence, repeatedly "warning" that America faces a new civil war unless these fictional conspirators stop trying to "replace" his cherished "legacy Americans." The GOP base has been getting the message. A poll conducted in December showed that nearly half of Republican respondents buy into the idea that there's a conspiracy to "replace" white Christians with different racial and ethnic groups. That proportion has probably risen since then, as Carlson's deluge has further mainstreamed this delusional and dangerous notion. Unsurprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in hate crimes, of which this Buffalo shooting is merely the most dramatic recent example.
In April 2021, Tucker "openly and emphatically defended replacement theory" with batshit metaphors. "What if you were a kid and you and your siblings saw your parents adopt a bunch of new kids, give them more stuff and treat them better, huh?" (video)

How obsessed is Carlson with this racist theory? The New York Times recently published a comprehensive study of 1,150 episodes of Carlson's show. One finding: Carlson "amplified the idea that Democratic populations and others want to force demographic change through immigration" in more than 400 episodes. Carlson is blunt, stating that "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". According to Matt Gertz of Media Matters:
That's the heart of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which is popular among white nationalists and was previously confined to the fringes of U.S. media. That racist trope motivated the likes of the mass shooters at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and an El Paso, Texas, Walmart and two New Zealand mosques in 2019.
MSNBC Columnist Cynthia Miller-Idriss explained how Carlson spreads ugly, anti-immigrant bigotry, "using exclusionary, incendiary and dehumanizing rhetoric and language like a 'flood of illegals' alongside descriptions of mass immigration as making America 'poor and dirtier'". But it's not only Carlson.
Laura Ingraham has warned viewers that "the Democrats want to replace many of you," suggesting there is an "invasion of the country" and referring to Texas as a state that is "completely overrun" by an illegal invasion. . . . [As] the country moves closer to the actual demographic changes that are manipulated in replacement and genocide conspiracy theories, invoking the idea of a "great replacement" as an existential threat on mainstream network news reinforces and legitimizes white supremacists' fears and sense of urgency in a way that feels unique to this time….

These conspiracy theories . . . that have been core to white-supremacist beliefs for decades have no place on mainstream networks that beam into millions of Americans' living rooms each evening. And yet, here we are, with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praising Carlson, host of the most-watched show on cable news, for "finally" promoting the "great replacement," and a white supremacist website describing him as "literally our greatest ally."
And, slowly but surely, more and more Republicans are echoing these sentiments in tweets, public statements, and speeches. While they (usually) don't issue direct calls for violence, they make no attempt to hide their sympathy and support for far-right terrorism and murder.


Even as the "great replacement" theory keeps being cited by mass shooters (such as the El Paso Walmart shooting (23 dead to thwart a "Hispanic invasion", according to the killer) and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting (11 killed by a man who believed Jewish charities helped bring "invaders that kill our people" to the US), it has become more popular with Republican voters.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in Congress, has alluded to the "great replacement" theory in her recent campaign ads, including ones she purchased to appear on Facebook. An editorial in the Albany Times Union stated:
Ms. Stefanik isn't so brazen as to use the slogans themselves; rather, she couches the hate in alarmist anti-immigrant rhetoric that's become standard fare for the party of Donald Trump. And she doesn't quite attack immigrants directly; instead, she alleges that Democrats are looking to grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants in order to gain a permanent liberal majority, or, as she calls it, a 'permanent election insurrection.' Quite a choice of words . . .

The Harvard-educated Ms. Stefanik surely knows the sordid history and context of this. The idea of stoking racial, ethnic, and religious tribalism among voters dates back to this country's earliest days. At various times, politicians have warned that Catholics, Jews, or Muslims were out to 'change the culture,' or that Irish, Italian, Asian or eastern European immigrants would take the jobs — to 'replace' white, Protestant Americans.
Stefanik has decided to double down on her claim that Democrats are scheming to allow more and more immigrants into the country specifically to destroy the Republican Party. On Monday, she tweeted: "Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity."

In 2021, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused the left of bringing in immigrants to "drown traditional, classic Americans with as many people as they can"

During a 2021 committee hearing, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry said that "we're replacing national-born American — native-born Americans — to permanently transform the political landscape of this very nation".

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is currently under federal investigation for child sex trafficking and other crimes, defended Carlson's rants, tweeting that Carlson was "CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening in America". 

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has also openly espoused the "great replacement" theory. 

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance pushed the theory just last month. 

In February 2022, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin was seen with Vincent Foxx, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier who claims he has "deep connections" to her and her campaign.

Back in 2018, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a video to Facebook that argues Jews are orchestrating a mass migration to replace white people in "the biggest genocide in human history".  From all she has said since then, she still believes that. Greene also said the election of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib was part of "an Islamic invasion of our government".

Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers (a certifiable fruitcake who (believe it or not) makes Greene seem almost normal) implied that the Buffalo shooter was a federal operative. "Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo." She has also said "we are being replaced and invaded" by illegal immigrants.

Blake Masters, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Arizona Senate candidate, claimed this weekend that the Democrats' "electoral strategy" is to "open borders so they can bring in and amnesty **tens of millions** of illegal aliens."
 
Finally, nearly half of Republicans, and nearly one-third of the country, believe that "there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views," according to an Associated Press/NORC poll conducted in December 2021. The poll also determined that respondents who watched right-wing networks like OAN, Newsmax, and Fox News were far more likely to believe in the "replacement" theory.

Kathleen Belew, a history professor at the University of Chicago, explains, "For people in the white power movement, everything is framed through reproduction and gender." 
Which is why those racist groups are obsessed with declining birth rates among white women.

Danielle Moodie of The Daily Beast, asks:
What happens, however, when the white power movement is perfectly aligned with one of the two major political parties? Well, you get policies like Texas' six-week abortion ban, which authorizes citizens to file bounty lawsuits against women seeking an abortion, or anyone who assists in almost any fashion.

You also get the leaked decision penned by Supreme Justice (and Federalist Society member) Samuel Alito, that seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with it a women's right to choose.

So, if you force more white women to give birth, and you make pregnancy more dangerous for Black women—whose maternal mortality rate is more than twice as high as white women—you begin to actualize the white supremacist fantasy–an all white Christian nation.

The right has for years exploited white fragility, and pushed the idea that their preferred version of "American" identity (where white is the default, and everyone else is an "other"), is being destroyed from within our institutions.

That's why there's so much irrational resentment over affirmative action—because the right wants whites to believe "they" are coming for their jobs. That's why there's so much panic over "critical race theory" in schools, because "they" are coming to indoctrinate our children simply by teaching them the facts of America's white supremacist history. That's why politicians like Rep. Elise Stefanik, the 3rd-ranking Republican in the House, tweeted that there's "an invasion" on our southern border—because "they" are coming to take over our country. . . .

The Republican Party's embrace of Trumpism is fueled by white supremacist ideology, and they are no longer hiding it on the fringe, but parading it out as the central plank of the party. . . .

If the endgame is to take their country back and make America white again, killing Black people and other people of color is the most obvious and despicable tactic to achieve their goal.
The shooter's 180-page manifesto was reviewed by an NBC affiliate in Buffalo:
The document, which News 4 has reviewed, plotted the attack in grotesque detail. The writer plotted his actions down to the minute, included diagrams of his path through the store and said he specifically targeted the Tops Markets location on Jefferson Avenue because its zip code has the highest percentage of Black people close enough to where he lives. . . .

The manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely alleges white people are being "replaced" in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of non-white people.

In the manifesto, Gendron claims that he was radicalized on 4chan while he was "bored" at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

The document also claims "critical race theory," a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews.
Salon's Jon Queally notes:
[M]any of those horrified by Saturday's killings responded by saying the brutal and deadly attack in Buffalo cannot — and should not — be separated from the growing embrace of the far-right nationalism that has increasingly found a home inside more mainstream institutions in the U.S., including right-wing media outlets like Fox News and a Republican Party enthralled by the xenophobic and fascistic conspiracy theories of Donald Trump.
A statement from People's Action, a progressive advocacy group:
This racist attack is a pure example of evil. It's also the predictable result of the relentless onslaught of white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories spewed from the far right, increasingly distributed by major corporate news outlets like Fox News and the extremist politicians their billionaire allies have cultivated.
Kina Collins, a gun violence prevention advocate and Democratic congressional candidate for Congress in Illinois' 7th district, called the shooting a
devastating and sickening display of the racism, white supremacy, hate, and gun violence that plague this country. . . . This was an act of terrorism and it should be treated as such. It is another reminder that white supremacy has and will always be America's greatest threat. White supremacy has infiltrated our military and police departments. It was also on display on January 6th last year as insurrectionists, fueled by white supremacy, attacked our Capitol and threatened the lives of sitting members of Congress.
Journalist Sam Sacks also made a connection between the Buffalo shooter and Trump's "Big Lie" movement that incited the January 6 terrorists, tweeting: "The forces that drove the Buffalo mass shooter are the same that drove reactionaries to storm the US Capitol on Jan. 6. . . . They're all part of the same political project, and it's makin gains."

Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney accused her fellow Republicans of enabling "white supremacy".  She tweeted: "The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them."

Last week, a conspiracy theory was promoted by Republican pundits and politicians that President Joe Biden was stealing baby formula from Americans to feed "illegal" babies.

The Daily Beast's Wajahat Ali has had enough.
Republicans and the conservative media ecosystem have to answer for the blood on their hands. . . .

Until Republican leaders and conservative media stars explicitly renounce this white supremacist conspiracy, condemn it, and disassociate from its peddlers, it's fair to conclude they are entirely complicit with its message.

Journalists and reporters must repeatedly hound Republican officials with follow up questions about this national security threat. Recall that Democrats and President Joe Biden still are asked about "defunding the police," even though it is not a mainstream DNC position, or about critical race theory (CRT) panic even after it was revealed to be a bad-faith trojan horse created by right-wing activists to incite racial panic and anxiety.

Leading up to the election, any journalist worth their weight must doggedly ask every Republican elected official the following questions:
"Do you believe in the replacement theory?"

"Do you condemn the replacement theory, or do you support the ideology that has inspired numerous mass terrorists?"

"If you do condemn it, then why are you and your colleagues repeating it?"
at

No comments:

Post a Comment