Evil that ‘great replacement’ has wrought
Was the murderously twisted mind of the Buffalo mass shooter warped solely by contact with the heinous, un-American conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement”?
No. But to a depressed, impressionable adolescent running loose in the darkest corners of the web, the contact certainly didn't help.
And that contact was extensive, leading to his posting online a 180-page “manifesto” that specifically cited the theory as the reason he sought out a supermarket in Buffalo patronized by Black Americans in its neighborhood, killing 10 people and wounding three others.
The great replacement, either in its full-blown form (that “the elites” are deliberately seeking to replace White Americans with nonWhites devoted to the Democratic Party and the uprooting of American culture) or in other variants (that immigration and other forms of diversification necessarily entail threats to American society) is fundamentally xenophobic, racist nonsense that should be confronted as such by all who care about our nation's future.
It's dangerous, fringe thinking, promoted not so much by people who actually believe it, but by those who are so upset by the reality of a pluralistic America that they apparently think resistance to change must come by any means necessary, including ginning up folks who might take ideas to extremes.
Which is why one of the saddest aspects of its promulgation is seeing the great replacement theory embraced by nominally patriotic, established organizations.
As reporting by The New York Times published before the shooting shows, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in more than 400 episodes of his television show has supported the notion that American “elites” want to substitute White voters with immigrants or people from the “Third World.”
And, after claiming to distance itself from any racially hateful aspects of the prevarication that is GRT, the conservative Claremont Institute here in Southern California editorialized in February: “And so when powerful corporate media outlets unite to forbid discussion on a matter of concern to the American people, and to tar anyone who broaches such discussion by association with racists and anti-Semites, it is our duty to defy the fearmongering.”
A “matter of concern to the American people” such as ... how supposedly terrible immigration is, for instance? When anyone with any sense knows that immigration over the centuries is one of the fundamental building blocks of our nation's greatness?
The apologia for embracing this radical theory in the editorial in the institute's
The American Mind publication then goes all-in: “That is because the Great Replacement isn't fundamentally about race: it's about overturning American equality and meritocracy in favor of a radically new set of values.”
So, the Claremont Institute backs the conspiracy theory that was also cited by a mass shooter in Christchurch,
New Zealand, who killed 51 people; the Buffalo shooter searched out the screed published online by that murderer and quoted directly from it, cutting and pasting parts of it that refer to “white genocide” and show a concern about White birthrates in the West. And there was the El Paso, Texas shooter who, inspired by the Christchurch shooter, murdered Hispanics out of anger over the “invasion” of America.
Of course Carlson and other far-right backers of the theory say that they do not condone any violence wrought by crazies with a gun. Of course there is a danger to dwelling on acts and words of nuts future copycat killers might cite as reasons for their own future mayhem. But there is no ignoring the news of what has been done in the name of a viciously misguided way of looking at the world and the grand American experiment.
All people of goodwill must take stock of this present crisis and acknowledge the critical danger of promulgating a dangerous and a false theory that clearly can lead the psychically vulnerable into the depths of unspeakable evil, truly replacing the fundamental freedoms upon which our country was founded and, at our best, has spread throughout the world.