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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s self-stated motivation: his racist belief that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration in a “great replacement” theory.Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring thing for the network to disregard. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”Great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with non-white people, in an effort to achieve political aims.It is not a new concept. But Carlson has led the charge in reintroducing it to mainstream rightwing thought. In April a New York Times investigation found that in more than 400 hundred of his shows Carlson had advanced the idea that a “cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably left wing or right-wing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of right-wing conspiracy theories.Carlson referred to the gunman as “mentally ill” and launched an attack on “professional Democrats” who had “begun a campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”In April 2021, after Carlson claimed on his show that Democrats were “diluting” his vote by “importing a brand-new electorate”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Fox News to sound the alarm.“Make no mistake: this is dangerous stuff. The ‘great replacement theory’ is a classic white supremacist trope that undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.“It is a concept that is discussed almost daily in online racist fever swamps. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of ‘Jews will not replace us!’ in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand.”The ADL called for Carlson to be fired for his comments, but instead the rightwing host – whose show is the most-watched on cable news – has thrived, and his passion for the topic of replacement has spread to his colleagues.But Carlson is not alone on Fox.Laura Ingraham, who hosts an hour-long show at 10pm, has told her viewers that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants”, while Jeanine Pirro claimed on a radio show that liberals were engaged in “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”.“​​To be clear, Fox News is far from the only place where you might hear such dangerous rhetoric,” wrote Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter institute.“[But] the size of Fox News’s audience is what is notable. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network, and Carlson’s show is the most-watched on cable news, routinely drawing more than 3 million viewers a night.”Fox News declined to comment when asked if it planned to condemn the idea of white replacement or take action against Carlson. A spokeswoman pointed to examples of Carlson denouncing violence on his show. Fox News was one of six media organizations which the gunman claimed, in his manifesto, were disproportionately influenced by Jewish people.The network’s popularity has given it an outsized influence over the Republican party, an influence and relationship which was revealed recently when leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, showed Meadows in frequent communication with Fox News hosts as supporters of Trump besieged the US Capitol on 6 January.It should perhaps be little surprise, then, that Trump-supporting Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance have also embraced replacement theory.“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Washington Post. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”The Buffalo shooter did not mention Fox News as an influence on his political beliefs, but said he had been radicalized through the extremist online forum 4chan, where he had found “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out”. From there, the gunman said, he had discovered sources including the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.Curiously, the founder of the Daily Stormer has called Tucker Carlson “literally our greatest ally”, and praised the Fox News host in 2021, in the wake of his replacement theory comments.“[Carlson was] dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.Since the shooting Carlson and his fellow Fox News hosts have justifiably drawn criticism for their promotion of replacement theory. But Gertz said the issue ultimately runs deeper, all the way to the Murdoch family which controls the channel.“Everyone knows the score here,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson is doing his job. He is providing the content that the Fox News brass, the Murdochs, want out of their 8pm slot.“If they didn’t want him to do this, they could make him stop – but they’ve decided not to. And they have decided not to do that because he is still profitable for them.”TopicsBuffalo shootingFox NewsUS television industryUS politicsRaceThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The Guardian view on the Buffalo shooting: a wake-up call for the Republican right | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on the Buffalo shooting: a wake-up call for the Republican right EditorialVersions of ‘replacement theory’ are becoming dangerously close to mainstream in American politics According to a poll published in the United States earlier this month, one in three adults believes that an attempt is being made “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants in order to achieve electoral gains”. A similar proportion sees the cultural and economic influence of US-born Americans diminishing as a consequence. The vast majority of those holding these views are likely to be white. From being a fringe notion on the extreme right, “replacement theory” appears to be entering the bloodstream of mainstream political discourse in the US.This should be seen as an insidious, disturbing backdrop to the mass shooting that took place in Buffalo at the weekend. Payton Gendron, the teenage suspect, is charged with shooting 13 people – 11 of them black – in a supermarket in a black neighbourhood of the city. Ten died. The action appears to have been carried out alone, and the suspect reportedly posted an online “manifesto” in which replacement theory is melded with anti-black racism and antisemitic content and tropes. Most of its material seems to have been culled via solitary immersion in far-right websites. Black people, read one passage, were equivalent to immigrants in that they “invade our lands … live on government support and attack and replace our people”.Buffalo joins Charleston, El Paso and Pittsburgh as a site of bloody tragedy, after murderous attacks by lone white attackers. Last year the FBI identified the lethal rise of far-right terrorism aimed at minority ethnic groups as the biggest domestic security threat to America. Inevitably, there will now be renewed focus on President Biden’s stalling gun control programme – the latest to come up against the seemingly insuperable intransigence of Congress and the influence of the National Rifle Association. This was the deadliest mass shooting in America in 2022, but also the 198th to claim the lives of four or more people since the turn of the year. Despite Mr Biden’s commitment to reform, improved background checks and a ban on the kind of assault weapon used in Buffalo seem as far away as ever. Social media platforms will also come under renewed and deserved scrutiny.But there is a wider political context that needs to be recognised. The post-Trump radicalisation of parts of the Republican right has led to the cultivation of demographic and racial anxiety, succouring extremist views. Explicit references to race or ethnicity are usually absent from such interventions, allowing plausible deniability. The Fox News political commentator, Tucker Carlson, who hosts one of the most popular cable news shows in the US, regularly ploughs this furrow: in one show last year, Mr Carlson argued that Democrats are seeking “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people”, who are “newly arrived from the third world”.Channelling and perpetuating the Trumpian “build a wall” mindset, senior Republican politicians have also used the language of replacement and “invasion” in relation to the southern border. Proposals for immigration amnesties have been conspiratorially framed as a means to secure a permanent liberal majority in Washington. Meanwhile the caricature of “critical race theory” as a pro-black threat to white identity has incubated the fear of a kind of “replacement” from within. In the wake of the Buffalo shootings, Mr Biden said that hate “remains a stain on the soul of America”. The radical Republican right and their cheerleaders are coming perilously close to being its enablers.TopicsBuffalo shootingOpinionUS politicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpAntisemitismThe far righteditorialsReuse this content More

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      US gun violence over weekend puts focus on easy access to weapons

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      US gun violence over weekend puts focus on easy access to weapons Violence includes Buffalo shooting that left 10 people dead, as well as two dead in Houston, one in Los Angeles and five in ChicagoAmerica on Monday was picking up the pieces from a weekend of gun violence that – outside the cost of lives – has refocused the country’s leadership on the toxic interplay of political ideology and easy access to handguns and battlefield weapons.Scrutiny of Republicans who embrace ‘great replacement theory’ after Buffalo massacreRead moreIn the most recent case, two people were killed Sunday and at least three others hospitalized after a shooting at a large Houston, Texas, flea market. In California, also on Sunday, at least one person died and five were wounded – including four listed in critical condition – after a shooting at a church with a predominantly Taiwanese congregation in Orange county, south of Los Angeles.In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot enacted a weekend curfew for unaccompanied minors at a city park after a 16-year-old boy was killed there. At least 33 people were shot, five fatally, in weekend violence across the city, police said.The shootings, each horrific in their own way, punctuated the weekend’s main horror: an 18-year-old espousing white supremacist ideology who went to an African American neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and – in less than two minutes – gunned down 13 people at a grocery, killing 10.That shooting – one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent memory – has renewed scrutiny on internet-promulgated hate speech, access to assault-style guns and body armor, and the inability of law enforcement authorities, elected politicians, religious leaders and the commercial sector to stop such violence from recurring.In the Buffalo shooting at Tops Friendly grocery, white suspect Payton Gendron is accused of specifically targeting a Black neighborhood and taking aim at Black victims – shoppers, grocery workers and a security guard.He had purportedly made threatening comments that brought police to his high school last spring, raising questions about whether authorities botched an opportunity to short-circuit Saturday’s killings.Gendron was never charged with a crime, and investigators had no further contact with him after his release from a hospital where he was mentally evaluated for about 36 hours.Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said the threat Gendron had made was “general” in nature and unrelated to race. “Nobody called in,” he said. “Nobody called any complaints.”New York is one of several states that, in recent years, have enacted “red flag” laws which are intended to prevent mass shootings, but they rely on a legal petition to temporarily seize people’s firearms, or prevent them from buying guns.Federal authorities, led by the FBI which is investigating the attack as a hate crime, have said they are working to confirm the authenticity of a racist 180-page document, purportedly written by Gendron, that laid out a plan to terrorize nonwhite, non-Christian people.Buffalo shooting: what we know about the victims so farRead moreIn a Twitch livestream video of the attack, Gendron allegedly trains his gun on a white person behind a checkout counter before apologizing and moving on.A purported screenshot of the video circulating online showed the N-word scrawled in white, along with the number “14”, which is an apparent reference to this 14-word white supremacist phrase: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”Gendron, the Buffalo police commissioner Gramaglia said, planned to continue his assault in the surrounding neighborhood. But he was apprehended outside the grocery after removing his body armor and setting down his Bushmaster rifle with an extended 70-round magazine.“This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could,” the Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, said Sunday.Representing families of the massacre victims, renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump told reporters at a news conference Monday that cable news pundits who have spoken fawningly of the same extremist ideology embraced by the alleged shooter should be held accountable.The manifesto attributed to Gendron talks about the racist theory that Democrats are pushing open immigration policies to “replace” Republican voters with people of color and retain control of the country’s levers of power.Crump called pundits airing the ideology on mainstream news channels as “accomplices”.“Even though they might not have pulled the trigger, they loaded the gun,” he said.Released, recorded radio transmissions between emergency services showed the speed of the Buffalo massacre and how little time authorities had to intervene. Police had Gendron in custody within six minutes of being alerted to the attack, yet 10 people were still killed.“Radio, send as many cars as you possibly can,” a responding officer says at about 2.33pm. Less than 30 seconds later, firefighters radioed in that there were at least three people down on the ground and that police “have him” about 20 ft from where they were. At 2.36pm, police reported they had arrested the suspect and confiscated a gun.But the shooting has brought, as many times before, questions about what authorities can do to confront individuals espousing violently racist intentions before they act on them. And it has brought pressure on social media platforms to flag content posted on their sites.Before the 2018 massacre of 17 students at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and the killings of more than two dozen people at a Texas church in 2017, authorities had received information indicating the assailant’s violent intent or history.On Sunday, New York governor Kathy Hochul promised action on hate speech that she said spreads “like a virus”. President Biden is expected in Buffalo on Tuesday to meet with victims’ families. Those slain included an 86-year-old woman who had just visited her husband in a nursing home, a man buying a cake for his grandson, and a church deacon helping people get home with their shopping.As political figures visited the area over the weekend, some said it was urgent to separate the bonds between gun ownership and religious faith or extremist ideologies.But for many in the targeted Buffalo community, Gendron’s intent wasn’t the salient problem – it was how the shooting was rooted in US social history.“The present is the past – same thing,” community activist Marietta Malcolm said. “Don’t think like this is an isolated incident, or act like we haven’t had 300 years of it. Every time people say racism doesn’t exist, somebody does something to prove that it does.”TopicsUS gun controlBuffalo shootingUS politicsRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder | Jason Stanley

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      Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murderJason StanleyThis once fringe ideology, which was at the heart of Nazism, has gained mainstream traction thanks in part to the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News On Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.Gendron was a meticulous planner. He live-streamed his massacre, and the video begins with him following to the letter the beginning of the plan he lays out in the manifesto.. But the manifesto – which is meant to inspire and instruct subsequent attacks – also outlines the ideology that inspired the murders. Gendron was motivated by a classic version of White Replacement Theory, the view that a cabal of global elites is trying to destroy white nations, via the systematic replacement of white populations. According to White Replacement Theory, the strategies employed by these “global elites” include the mass immigration of supposedly “high fertility” non-whites, and encouraging intermingling between members of non-white races and whites. Gendron was deeply influenced by a series of recent mass killers who were animated by white replacement theoryincluding Brenton Tarrant, whom Gendron openly acknowledges as his model. In Christchurch, New Zealand, Tarrant massacred 51 people at a Mosque in the name of White Replacement Theory, also live-streaming his actions.Gendron’s manifesto begins in a similar fashion to Tarrant’s, by decrying the “white genocide” that will result from the supposedly low fertility rates of white populations and the high fertility rates of non-white immigrants brought in to “replace” them. It is more openly anti-Black than Tarrant’s manifesto – it is a deeply American version, with roots in Jim Crow and lynching. It is also vastly more explicitly antisemitic. Ten pages of Gendron’s manifesto are devoted to arguing for a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap, as well as (ironically) a genetic basis for higher rates of violent crime. It’s clear that Gendron closely follows various academic debates about race, IQ, and crime. According to the ideology guiding Gendron, Black people are not intelligent enough to engineer the replacement of whites, and the destruction of their civilization. The real actors behind White Replacement, according to Gendron, are the Jews, a topic which occupies the subsequent 29 pages of his manifesto.Gendron’s lengthy section on Jews purports to document Jewish hatred of non-Jews. It includes a section of Talmud quotes supporting Gendron’s thesis that Jews hate Christians, and a section documenting supposed control of academia, media, and industry (focusing on the pharmaceutical industry). Gendron ties Jews to child abuse and pedophilia. The section mocks a supposed Jewish fixation on environmental causes of Black crime. Gendron argues that Jews are behind Black social and political movements and organizations, including the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.Gendron also argues that Jews are behind the movement for transgender inclusivity, supposedly sponsoring transgender summer camps for “Scandinavian style whites”.The section ends by blaming Jews for creating “infighting” between people and races. The example Gendron’s manifesto provides is that “Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people”.The ideology that motivated Gendron’s mass murder in Buffalo, White Replacement Theory, has a lengthy and blood-soaked 20th century history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, mostly immigrants, in 2011, Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Tree of Life Synagogue killings in 2018, and the murder of 23 people, mostly immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.Mass atrocities do not occur in a vacuum. They are enabled by a present normalization of a lengthy previous history, a process that the philosopher of mass killing Lynne Tirrell labels the social embeddedness condition. White Replacement Theory was the dominant structuring narrative of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler also announced his genocidal intent in a lengthy manifesto about the supposed Jewish threat to white civilization, entitled Mein Kampf, which was published in 1924. Hitler also was obsessed by mass immigration, and the threat it posed to “white civilization.”Currently, White Replacement Theory has been mass popularized and normalized, perhaps chiefly by the American political commentator Tucker Carlson. It is rapidly moving to the center of the mainstream narrative of America’s Republican party. In this form, it appears stripped of its explicit connection to antisemitism. You will not find Tucker Carlson asserting that the Jews are behind the mass replacement of American whites that he bemoans regularly in what is regularly the most watched cable news show in the United States among adults 25-54.But what Carlson has been doing is spending an entire year repeating a conspiracy by Christopher Rufo that says that American education has been infected by a pro-Black ideology (CRT) that was created by German Jewish Marxist intellectuals (the Frankfurt School). And that while the CRT version of this conspiracy theory is new, it is a direct descendent of the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory, which was a primary topic of Breivik’s manifesto.The fact that Carlson does not mention American Jews as a target by name should be cold comfort to American Jews. Every single right wing anti-Semite in America who watches Tucker Carlson’s show hears him as denouncing Jews when he regularly platforms the 20th century’s worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.Some American Jews hope that by identifying as white, and lending their support to racist narratives about IQ and crime, they can diminish rightwing American antisemitism. This is a terrible error. American Ku Klux Klan ideology in the 1920s strongly overlapped with Nazi ideology, placing Jews at the center of a conspiracy fomenting a supposed race war to overthrow white civilization. American Jews who support Tucker Carlson and his ilk, that is, others who repeat the White Replacement narrative, are supporters both of anti-Black racism, and antisemitism in its most violent form.It is in the tracts of the 20th century’s most explicit antisemites that we find the development of White Replacement Theory, who used it to justify the mass killing of Jews. Gendron’s manifesto reveals yet again the unbreakable historical link between anti-Black racism and antisemitism. Any supporter of White Replacement Theory is a clear enemy of the Jewish People.America has many mass shootings. But this mass killing of Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket must serve as a wake-up call to our country. White Replacement Theory is deeply ingrained in the worst aspects of American and European history. With its attacks on “Critical Race Theory”, this is a fact that the American political right is deliberately and knowingly trying to erase from our collective consciousness, so they can appeal to it again as a political weapon against liberal democracy.As Gendron’s manifesto makes clear, White Replacement Theory is not just an attack on minorities. It is a weapon directed by fascists at American democracy itself.TopicsUS newsOpinionBuffalo shootingNew YorkAntisemitismRaceUS politicsThe far rightcommentReuse this content More