Buffalo shooter’s manifesto promotes ‘Great Replacement,’ antisemitism and previous mass shooters

Buffalo shooter’s manifesto promotes ‘Great Replacement,’ antisemitism and previous mass shooters

The Anti-Defamation League reports:

On May 14, 2022, a gunman killed 10 people and injured 3 more inside a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, after espousing violent white supremacist and antisemitic views online. In court following his arrest, the alleged gunman, identified as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron, from Southern Tier, New York, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and was ordered held without bail.

According to an online screed Gendron allegedly posted shortly before the attack, his goal was to “spread awareness to my fellow whites about the real problems the West is facing,” and “encourage further attacks that will eventually start the way that will save the Western world.” It is not clear where this document was originally posted, but Gendron reportedly claimed he planned to post it on 8chan.moe and 4chan, and send links to Discord servers.

The manifesto’s language closely echoes the themes of previous rants posted by white supremacist shooters, and refers repeatedly to the virulently racist and antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which argues that Jews are responsible for non-white immigration into the United States, and that non-white immigrants will eventually replace (and lead to the extinction of) the white race. [Continue reading…]

Rolling Stone reports:

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 fearmongering 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. [Continue reading…]

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