Where the blame lies
Are you “right wing”? Depending on the definition, sure. Are you “left wing”? Depending on the definition, sure.
One thing about a mass shooter is that he’ll give extremists on the right and left something to blame on each other so that our political essence will remain demonization instead of solution.
There is no need to waste any more breath on sensible gun restrictions when there is hate to exploit and regenerate.
So it was with this 18-year-old self-expressed racist socialist fascist environmentalist who killed 10 people whom he drove three hours to target at a supermarket in Buffalo because of its known concentration of Black customers.
The italicized words above are from the shooter’s “manifesto,” a sophomoric diatribe eventually leading to the primary conclusion that Black people are to be hated and killed because of their supposed inferiority and the supposed concerted attempt to have them overtake America from white people.
Instantly, many in mainstream media reported that the shooter’s manifesto revealed him to be motivated by what’s called “great replacement theory.” That is a conspiratorialist’s concoction sprung up in white supremacist groups. In recent months it has reached Fox News where rightwing demagogue Tucker Carlson has advanced it at least in part by asserting that liberal “elites” seek to end white dominance in America through a combination of immigration by, and higher birth rates among, non-whites.
More Democratic voters and fewer Republican voters, in other words.
Naturally, then, there was a rush on the left and in some mainstream media to blame Carlson for this mass shooting.
But a lone talking head living too loosely by the partisan blabber of a cable-network business model can be irresponsible, ridiculous, offensive and seemingly racist without being remotely accountable for the criminal actions or reactions of a creepy kid and mass murderer.
Carlson also has spoken favorably of non-violence. That glimpse of sanity separates him from, for example, his role model, Donald Trump, at least in terms of complicity.
Carlson didn’t directly encourage anyone to take any specific criminal or harmfully violent action. Trump directly told a specific throng of right-wing yahoos to go to the U.S. Capitol and execute a scruffy coup to deliver him the presidency the American political process had taken legally from him.
Some on social media said that Carlson must be brought up on charges and not allowed to continue spreading such messages. But there is a better idea for a free and sane society: Don’t suppress the offensive blabbermouth, but endeavor to defeat him. Don’t deny free expression, but call it out when it’s racist nonsense. Don’t reach to censor, but strive to prevail.
On the other side, inevitably, emails began to show up Monday on my computer screen from the usual right-wing correspondents. They were spreading two conspiracies.
One was that the “deep state” concocted the shooter’s manifesto to pin a ten-fold murder rap on the innocent far right. That’s surely seen widely as so obviously crazy—even still—that it can be dismissed.
The other alleged conspiracy was that the mainstream media and public officials were advocating suppression of the shooter’s manifesto not because they believed such vitriol might inspire copycats, as they said, but because the manifesto revealed the “real story” that the monstrous killer is not at all a right-winger but a militant environmentalist left-winger.
The kid murdered Black people because he treasured the Earth. That seems to be the allegation.
Here’s where that distortion comes from: As the opening italicized text signals, the shooter’s manifesto amounted to semi-coherent political rambling. A sick young mind can, at once, think contradictory things superficially.
It is true that the manifesto extols environmental devotion, just as it touts fascism while seeming to see a place for socialism.
But the manifesto is at its clearest, and undeniable, in being avowedly racist in stereotyping and deploring Black people. And 10 people are dead because of that. And racism, at least in its extreme “white supremacy” form of the modern day, is most usually identified as a sick and hyper-extreme version of conservatism.
No one died in that Buffalo supermarket because of ecological extremism or controversial systems of government spending and public ownership.
The Buffalo shooting can and should be blamed on the ubiquitous validation and encouragement of racist hate through modern forms of communication transcending a lone ratings-chasing celebrity on Fox. It can be blamed on a gun-galore culture.
And it can be blamed on people who respond to hate’s tragic consequence by doubling down on their own hate.
Bodies are piling up across the American landscape because of evil in a relative few, the hate of many more, and the moral and political failings of American culture, society and politics, all programmed anymore to spew hate reflexively rather than invest objectively even in a second thought, much less an objective one.