The tragic mass shooting in Buffalo, NY this weekend has sent America collectively into another mourning period. 18-year-old White supremacist Peyton Gendron took ten lives in cold blood, livestreaming his savagely targeting Black customers and workers at a Tops grocery store in the Blackest ZIP code he could find in upstate New York.
His motives for the killing were evident from the start: he had the N-word scrawled on his gun, he spoke of his plans to target the community on Discord. Gendron penned a 180-page manifesto (PDF), opining about the paranoid “Great Replacement” conspiracy delusion – in which White Americans are “displaced” by an infinite number of “third world” immigrants. The first goal in his manifesto was “kill as many Blacks as possible”. And per his manifesto, who is the driving force behind said “Replacement”? Jews.
Why did you decide to carry out the attack?
Peyton gendron manifesto, page 4
To show to the replacers that as long as the White man lives, our land will never be theirs
and they will never be safe from us.
Facing life without parole, Gendron is currently in custody under suicide watch. And as he sits in prison, as if on cue, a slew of writers set themselves to toil at their keyboards, publicly wondering how such a thing could possibly occur. “How could this happen?”, they ask. “How could this guy do such a thing? What was his community like?” Invariably, this is followed by incredulous think pieces.
Criminology professors assure us in the Washington Post that “hate is not the root cause” here: “mass shooters walk a common route to violence through early childhood trauma”, a route that winds through existential crisis and hate, and eventually leads to a violent outburst against the target they deem responsible for their plight (here, Black people). People in his hometown of Conklin, New York — a “Mayberry setting” with Colonial and Cape Cod homes, the Binghamton Press reminds us — cannot comprehend his being from there, they’re “in shock”.
Gendron had previously threatened to shoot up his high school graduation while a junior at Susquehanna Valley High School, which led to police being dispatched as well as a mental health evaluation — and “[n]obody called any complaints” in about him after he was released from the hospital. The New York Times interviews neighbors who let us know about the “smart, quiet kid” who “just wasn’t that social” and “played basketball”.
Are you a Christian?
No. I do not ask God for salvation by faith, nor do I confess my sins to Him. I personally
believe there is no afterlife…Are you racist?
Yes I am racist because I believe in differences of capabilities between races.Are you intolerant?
Sure. The last virtues of a dying nation are tolerance and apathy, and I want none of it.Are you an anti-semite?
peyton gendron manifesto, page 7
YES!! I wish all JEWS to HELL! Go back to hell where you came from DEMON!…
Let us not mince any words: Peyton Gendron is a murderer. Let us not invent nuance in his views: Peyton Gendron is a White supremacist. Peyton Gendron is a terrorist, a “domestic enemy” and a miscreant. His future consists of bars and correctional officers, not basketball and Mayberry. But he does not exist in a vacuum.
Americans of Color have been talking about White supremacy’s ubiquity for decades. The “Great Replacement” conspiracy which drove Gendron to commit homicide is the same conspiracy echoed by neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, the same one repeated by Tucker Carlson, supported by Rep. Matt Gaetz, embraced by Rep. Elise Stefanik — and that as many as 1 in 3 Americans agree with (including nearly half of Republicans, and a significant percentage of Democrats).
No longer a “fringe” ideology, “Great Replacement” conspiracies find homes on cable news, in the Arizona state senate, and in the minds of Ohio Senate primary winners.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy has inspired White supremacist mass shooters the world over, including in Christchurch, New Zealand. While some of its defenders attempted to misconstrue this weekend’s carnage as a “false flag“, Americans of Color know that this is not out of character for America. Far from it. We are, after all, a country where a Congresswoman can attend a White nationalist rally and have “no regrets” afterward.
I, for one, am not shocked or surprised by the events of Buffalo. I am saddened by the loss of life. I pity a community that can no longer even feel safe taking the most mundane of grocery trips. I’m angry. But this is anomalous only in its scale and degree. White supremacy affects Americans of Color daily. We are the “replacers” that over 100 million Americans — America’s “Terrible Third”, perhaps — believe want to affect elections (as if this were not the motive of every voter). We hear Tucker Carlson, and know he’s speaking about our families. We know the motives of the people seen in cahoots with MTG. We hear the rhetoric, and we bristle at the dog whistles.
And we brace ourselves as we pray that a Peyton Gendron never happens to our communities.
The real war I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews.…the Jews are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them again.
peyton gendron manifesto, page 24
Let’s stop with the collective hand-wringing as if we could never have seen anything of the sort coming. Let’s stop asking “how could this happen”, and start listening to the Americans of Color who have been raising red flags for years. Call out “Great Replacement” theory for the racist, anti-Semitic filth that it is, wherever it is. It’s not just Tucker Carlson. It’s not just Matt Gaetz. Blaming social media companies a la New York Governor Kathy Hochul (and expecting a “one second” removal time for inappropriate content?), at best, addresses one platform for the rhetoric, and acts as a slippery slope to undue censorship at worst.
America needs to be honest with itself: in America, White supremacist ideology is everywhere, and the eradication of racist ideologies will require effort from all of us. Until we are fully prepared to come to terms with this fact, and the scale to which it is true, America will continue to risk being sent into mourning by White supremacists.