The Terrifying Familiarity of the Buffalo Shooting Suspect's Extremist Screed

[Nevilledog]

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/the-terrifying-familiarity-of-the-buffalo-shooting-suspects-extremist-screed

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https://archive.ph/80Nuh

On Saturday night in Austin, Texas, Ted Nugent opened for Donald Trump with a kind of love song: “I love you people madly, but I’d love you more if you went forward and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists.” This was hours after an 18-year-old white supremacist terrorist—his words—in Buffalo, New York, walked into a Tops supermarket, in a zip code he allegedly chose for having “the highest Black percentage that is close enough to where I live,” and allegedly shot 13 people, 11 of them Black, 10 of them now dead.

Nugent spoke on a stage, committing what could be seen as an act of “stochastic terrorism”—violent speech that might reasonably be expected to lead others to actual violence. The accused murderer, Payton Gendron, wrote his beliefs in a document posted online shortly before he livestreamed his alleged massacre, which he hopes will lead others to undertake more murder, or, according to his manifesto, “revolutionary change,” or “civil war.” The two men’s words are unrelated—except that both men are part of a movement that is increasingly embracing open borders between rhetoric and action. Which is why, even as the names of the dead demand our grief—Celestine Chaney, Roberta Drury, Andre Mackneil, Katherine Massey, Margus Morrison, Heyward Patterson, Aaron Salter, Geraldine Talley, Ruth Whitfield, and Pearl Young—the alleged murderer’s manifesto requires our attention. Not a platform–our strategic scrutiny. The case for ignoring such “fringe” hate no longer stands now that it has moved to the center.

Liberals have been quick to connect the manifesto to Tucker Carlson—whom the alleged killer doesn’t in fact mention. The link is the “great replacement theory,” the idea that “elites” are replacing white Americans with non-whites. It’s a racist conspiracy theory embraced by Gendron, promoted by Carlson, and, according to one survey, supported by one third of Americans. Genealogies of fascism do matter—”replacement theory” comes to us from a 1973 racist French novel, The Camp of the Saints, celebrated by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—but by seeking out only individual lines of influence, we miss the more dangerous movement that gives rise to them all. Did Gendron watch Carlson? We don’t know. Would he have had to in order to find replacement theory? Not at all. It’s everywhere now.

Gendron borrows the “great replacement” from the 2019 manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 and injured 40 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Gendron titled his 180-page screed “You Wait for a Signal While Your People Wait for You”—a call to action—after a section heading in Tarrant’s “The Great Replacement.” He lifts both the format and large chunks of “The Great Replacement,” a process that’s not so much plagiarism as homage and advertisement. Not for the alleged killer himself, but for the potential killer in you, the reader.

*snip*

[BigmanPigman]

1. These murderers have an actual format now.

Last night a guest was on Rachel Maddow and he explained how they communicate and what they look for. Sort of scary.