The violence, in fact, is only the latest attack in the American radical-right insurgency against our democracy, the simmering civil war that they openly declared on Jan. 6. The white-nationalist ideology behind it—laid bare in the shooter’s 181-page manifesto—has been widely adopted not just by young radicals like Payton Gendron, but at the highest reaches of the Republican Party, led by the most popular cable talk-show host in the country, Tucker Carlson.
Naturally, they have already begun their usual campaigns of denial, obfuscation, and gaslighting in response to the clear need to hold them accountable for fueling this violence. And it will only get worse.
Gendron specifically targeted that store in that neighborhood, he said, because he wanted to find a soft target filled with African Americans—and drove some 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, after selecting it and conducting reconnaissance. He chose Buffalo, he said, because it “has the highest black population percentage and isn’t that far away.” He chose Blacks as his primary victims—eight of the 10 victims were African-American—because “they are an obvious, visible, and large group of replacers.”
This is a reference to “Replacement Theory,” the ideology that fueled the man’s terrorist motivations. Much of the manifesto is devoted to exploring various aspects of the “Great Replacement,” the belief that Western society is being flooded with brown-skinned minorities as part of a long-running plot to replace white people—a plot overseen by nefarious Jewish “globalists.”
A study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue examined this conspiracy theory in depth as a source of inspiration for a number of violent acts, including most notably the massacre in March 2019 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The theory, it found, has significant potential “to drive extreme-right mobilization and terrorist acts,” in large part because it “lends itself to calls for radical action against minority communities—including ethnic cleansing, violence and terrorism.”
The Buffalo shooter even described his radicalization process in his manifesto, saying that nearly every step in the process took place online—particularly on far-right-friendly platforms like the message board 4chan and on Gab. He claims he was inspired to conduct a lethal gun attack by the Christchurch shooter, as well as others, including the man who opened fire in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2020: “These men fought for me and had the same goals I did. It was there I asked myself: Why don’t I do something?”