Biden’s visit to racist massacre site will highlight US extremism
WASHINGTON: When President Joe Biden visits the site of a racist massacre in upstate New York on Tuesday, he’ll confront not only the shocking deaths of 10 Black people but warn against an ideology that “tears at the soul” of the country he promised to unite.
On one level, the trip by Biden and his wife Jill Biden to Buffalo will be a grimly routine tradition for presidents who for decades have railed against an unstoppable parade of mass shootings.
Hastily scheduled ahead of Biden’s departure Thursday for a major diplomatic trip to South Korea and Japan, the Buffalo visit will be a chance to “try to bring some comfort to the community,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Like all his predecessors to varying degrees, Biden has promised to address gun control, or rather the lack of gun control. Like them, he has made barely a dent.
However, what marks out Saturday’s horror, in which a white man went to a heavily African American neighborhood and allegedly opened fire, killing 10 and wounding three, is that the suspect apparently wrote a manifesto promoting increasingly widely held white supremacist ideas.
At the heart of the manifesto – which law enforcement believe is genuine – was a rant about what’s dubbed “replacement theory,” which purports the existence of a leftist plot to dilute the white population with non-white immigrants.
It’s a conspiracy theory that, like the bizarre QAnon narrative, has spread from the furthest fringes of society to surprisingly mainstream areas – most notably Tucker Carlson’s enormously influential nightly talk show on Fox News.
Prominent Republican members of Congress have also echoed “replacement theory” talking points, which in turn are not too distant from Donald Trump’s multiple speeches as president in which he demonized illegal immigrants as invaders, once calling them “animals.”
Republican House Representative Liz Cheney – a former member of the party’s inner circle who has rebelled against the dominant Trump wing – directly linked that kind of chatter to the Buffalo bloodshed.
Party leaders have “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” she tweeted, demanding that leaders “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”