We can't stamp out racism and extremism by ignoring them

SAN DIEGO >> If I may borrow a line from the pages of history, here's my message to the modern-day Republican Party: Until this moment, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no decency, at long last?

That is what Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, said on June 9, 1954, to Joseph Mccarthy after the Wisconsin senator accused high-ranking U.S. military leaders of being communists.

Today, in 2022, conservative Republicans are indecently blaming the victims of an apparent racist hate crime for allegedly lighting the fuse.

On May 14, an 18-year-old white male named Payton Gendron allegedly drove several hours to Buffalo, N.Y., where he sought out a largely black neighborhood. There, he allegedly walked into the Top Friendly Market and killed 10 people, most of them Black.

Judging from a 180-page “manifesto” that Gendron allegedly wrote and posted online, the young man appears convinced that White Americans are being “replaced” by non-whites — and that it is happening by design. The self-described white supremacist and anti-semite sees low birth rates among Whites as a “crisis” that “will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

It's bad enough that hateful people would kill fellow Americans based on skin color because of paranoia and fear. But what makes it worse is that, when tragedies occur, revisionists will spin the story to minimize the fallout.

We've seen hate get spun before.

On Aug 3, 2019, when Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old White male, allegedly killed 23 people and wounded 23 others in El Paso — most of them Hispanic — I heard from readers who challenged my characterization of the attack as racist because, they insisted, “Hispanics aren't a race.”

On March 16, 2021, when Robert Aaron Long — another 21 year-old white male — allegedly shot and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women at multiple Asian spas near Atlanta, Georgia, law enforcement officials insisted the attack was not about race but rather a “sex addiction.”

Even so, the spin after the massacre in Buffalo hits a new low.

Conservative writers and cable news hosts, along with their followers, are cynically trying to weasel out of taking responsibility for sounding the alarm over the “great replacement theory” — the very thing that appears to have triggered Gendron. Incredibly, they're claiming that the concept is the brainchild of liberals and progressives. According to this fairy tale explanation of where evil comes from, it is the left — specifically anyone who has ever mentioned the fact that changing demographics are remaking America, including its politics — that is responsible for the Buffalo massacre.

Apparently, the hall of blame includes me.

“Your view of the inevitable demographic changes that will make white Americans the minority are the direct result of illegal immigration,” wrote a reader. “This is vitally important for you to understand because the anger of many Americans is not going to go away and it is likely to manifest itself in very unpleasant ways as time goes on. Your `deal with it' attitude has the ring of a bully and I can guarantee you it will not be well-received.”

Meanwhile, conservative media are frantically deflecting.