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      BTS visit White House to discuss anti-Asian hate crime – video

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      BTS visited the White House to discuss hate crimes targeting Asians with the US president.
      The band members J-Hope, RM, Suga, Jungkook, V, Jin and Jimin joined the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, at her briefing with reporters before their meeting with Joe Biden.
      Jimin said the group had been ‘devastated by the recent surge’ of hate crime and intolerance against Asian Americans and others that has persisted since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
      ‘It’s not wrong to be different,’ Suga said through an interpreter. ‘Equality begins when we open up and embrace all of our differences’ 

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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justice

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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
      Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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      Will Republicans drop the Great Replacement Theory? Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      In a week when a teenager shot dead 10 Black people in Buffalo New York, apparently motivated by the ‘great replacement’ theory, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Michael Harriot and Anne Applebaum about why this racist ideology has become mainstream in rightwing circles in the US, and why we shouldn’t be surprised

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      Archive: Fox News, ABC News, CNN Follow The Guardian’s reporting of the shooting in Buffalo Listen to the first episode of the third series of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com. Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts. More

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      What is ‘great replacement’ theory and how did its racist lies spread in the US?

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      What is ‘great replacement’ theory and how did its racist lies spread in the US?Buffalo gunman is suspected of posting a 180-page racist diatribe in which he repeatedly referenced the extremist conspiracy theory Why are we talking about the ‘great replacement’ theory?On Saturday, a white man armed with an AR-15-style rifle entered a supermarket in Buffalo in New York state and killed 10 people, almost all of whom were African American. The gunman is suspected of having posted a 180-page racist diatribe in which he repeatedly referenced the extremist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”.The Buffalo shooter drew heavily on the white supremacist rantings of the gunman in the 2019 massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed. His similarly hate-filled statement was titled “The Great Replacement”.At its heart, the theory claims falsely that white people are being stripped of their power through the demographic rise of communities of color, driven by immigration. The lie has been integral to many of the most horrifying recent acts of white supremacist violence in the US.Far-right protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the killing of a woman, chanted “You will not replace us”. Replacement theory featured in the rants of mass shooters at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 in which 11 people were murdered; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 were killed in 2019; and a synagogue in Poway, California, the same year in which one person died.What is the theory and how did it emerge?Replacement theory is a set of racist and antisemitic paranoid lies and delusions that has cropped up around the world in the past decade. In the US it is expressed as the false idea that an elite cabal of Jews and Democrats is “replacing” white Americans with Black, Hispanic and other people of color by encouraging immigration and interracial marriage – with the end goal being the eventual extinction of the white race.The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) traces replacement theory back to early 20th century French nationalism. It began to receive popular attention in 2011 with the writings of the French critic Renaud Camus.In the US, the racist ideas were initially adopted by fringe websites including the chat boards 4chan and the technically now defunct 8chan.How has it spread through US society?More recently, the idea has been enthusiastically embraced by rightwing news outlets that have injected these hate-infused falsehoods into the mainstream of American public life.In particular attention is now falling on Tucker Carlson, the most avidly watched host on Fox News. A recent deep exploration by the New York Times found that his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, had on occasion drawn inspiration from white supremacist sites such as the neo-Nazi Stormfront.The newspaper found that in more than 400 episodes Carlson took up the idea that immigration was being exploited by elites to change the demographics of the US. Last year the ADL called for the TV host to be fired after he accused the Democrats on-air of “trying to replace the current electorate … with more obedient voters from the third world”.What has the theory done to American political debate?Having metastasized from fringe websites to Fox News, the idea of the imperiled white voter has spread its tentacles through the nation. An opinion poll last week by the Associated Press and the NORC center for public affairs research found that one in three US adults now subscribe to the false idea that a plot is under way to replace US-born Americans with immigrants, and that those US-born citizens are losing influence and power as a result.The notion has been taken up by Republican politicians at the highest levels. In the wake of the Buffalo shooting Liz Cheney, the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, accused the leadership of her own party in the House of enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism”.Cheney did not mention by name Elise Stefanik, who took over the number three role in the Republican House leadership from her after Cheney was ousted for having criticized former president Donald Trump. Stefanik has promoted a politicised version of replacement theory, claiming that Democrats are attempting a “permanent election insurrection” by seeking citizenship for undocumented immigrants in order to “overthrow our current electorate”.Other prominent Republicans who have amplified the lie include Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, and far-right members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.Is pressure mounting for something to be done about this?Cheney has called for Republican leaders to “renounce and reject” white supremacy. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican member of Congress from Illinois, has gone further, calling for several top Republicans themselves to be replaced.“The replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed,” he said.Charlie Sykes, a moderate conservative commentator who edits The Bulwark, wrote that responsibility for the Buffalo murders “lies with the murderer himself … But as conservatives once understood, ideas also have consequences; and poisonous demagoguery can have deadly results”.Such comments reflect a growing unease about the accommodation with replacement theory within rightwing politics and media. So far though the criticism is coming from individuals who have been pushed into the margins of the conservative movement, with no sign of change coming from the top.TopicsBuffalo shootingRepublicansRaceNew YorkUS politicsThe far rightexplainersReuse this content More

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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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      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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      Liz Cheney says Republican leadership has ‘enabled white supremacy’

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      Liz Cheney says Republican leadership has ‘enabled white supremacy’Her scathing tweet may have targeted Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who has complained of immigrants replacing white voters Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney has accused her Republican party leadership of enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism”, in a scathing message after the racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo.Cheney, who was removed from her position as the No 3 House Republican last year after she joined the panel investigating the 6 January Capitol attack, urged party leaders in a tweet to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them”.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.— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 16, 2022
      Her remarks were made amid increasing scrutiny of Republican figures who have embraced the racist “great replacement theory” the Buffalo killer is said to have cited in a manifesto he used to justify the murders.The far-right ideology expounds the view that immigration will ultimately destroy white values and western civilization.Although a growing number of Republican lawmakers and hopefuls have promoted the discredited conspiracy theory, including JD Vance, the Donald Trump-endorsed candidate who won last week’s Republican Senate primary in Ohio, many believe Cheney’s message is directed at one person: the Republican House conference chair, Elise Stefanik.The New York congresswoman, who was swiftly installed to replace Cheney when the House minority leader and Trump loyalist, Kevin McCarthy, orchestrated Cheney’s ouster last year, has used the great replacement theory to make false accusations that Democrats were plotting a “permanent election insurrection” by replacing white voters with immigrants.The Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is the only other Republican on the House panel investigating Trump’s insurrection efforts, posted his own tweet slamming Stefanik’s promotion of the theory as “despicable”.On Sunday he added another post, demanding that Stefanik, McCarthy and extremist Republican congress members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn be “replaced”.McCarthy is one of five Republicans who received subpoenas from the House panel last week as it seeks more information about Trump’s actions to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, including the deadly riots at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.Stefanik, meanwhile, has been furiously tweeting this morning, doubling down on her claims that Democrats are purposely manipulating immigration policy “specifically for political and electoral purposes”.TopicsRepublicansRaceUS politicsnewsReuse 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