Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo – The New Yorker

On Saturday, a gunman murdered ten people and wounded three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The suspect, who is eighteen, used a weapon painted with a white-supremacist slogan and live-streamed his attack. Prior to the shooting, he also allegedly posted a manifesto, which relies heavily on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that has become increasingly mainstream in a number of Western countries, from France to the United States. To help understand that theory, and the dangers of white-supremacist violence more broadly, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the alleged shooters influences, why the notion of a great replacement has gained a foothold in the United States and elsewhere, and how the media and political actors have used the theory to their benefit.

This theory seems to be useful for people in many different countries, and to target many different groups. Can you describe what it is, how it has changed over time, and how its become so useful to people such as this alleged shooter?

We can get into the textual background of the term if you want to, but its basically a new language for the same set of ideas that have worked to connect many different kinds of social threats into one broadly motivating, violent, and frightening world view for people in the white-power movement and on the militant right. The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of lites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integrationall of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing youll notice in the manifestos and in the talking points, really going back through the twentieth century, is this focus on the reproductive capacity of white women in maintaining the white race as a nation.

You mean the manifestos generally, or the manifesto last night?

Generally, and also the manifesto last night. The manifesto last night is also, broadly, copied from the Christchurch manifesto. [In March, 2019, a white gunman killed fifty-one people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.] Were dealing with a genre of writing in which these threats are brought up to paint a picture of a race under siege. It changes the logic for some of the issues that we think of as capital-C conservative. So opposition to immigration is not simply about national security. Its about the reproductive capacity of immigrants and the fear that the white race will be overwhelmed and eradicated by intermixing. It is seen as an apocalyptic threat to their race.

The great replacement comes about relatively recently from The Camp of the Saints, a novel that depicts a surge of migrants that usurps European culture. But its really the same ideology as the New World Order conspiracy, the idea of the Zionist occupational governmentwhich is how people talked about this in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. We see versions of this going all the way back to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, the writings of Madison Grant, and things such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. All of these are the same set of beliefs packaged with the cultural context at the time.

The French origins interest me, because it seems like you can plug in these different enemy groups in different places, right?

Absolutely.

It can be Muslims in France, and it can be Mexican Americans in the United States, or African Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that?

It allows an opportunism in selecting enemies so that you can tack to the scapegoat of a particular time and place, but it also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside, regardless of the enemy on the outside. Its about the fundamental importance of the preservation and birth rate of the white race. So the elements that are consistent across time are the idea that the white race can be threatened by intermixing and the idea that there is some kind of evil, lite force interested in eradicating it.

Its not just about passive demographic change, and the news stories we see pretty often about when a county or a city or the nation will no longer be majority white. Its about an apocalyptic threat perpetrated by what these conspiracists think of as a cabal. They see, for instance, abortion as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see residential integration as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see feminism as a scheme to keep white women out of the home and lower the white birth rate.

Who do they think is running this cabal? Is there any intellectual interest to that, or is it irrelevant?

The evil lites are typically rendered as Jewish, and I use that word cabal knowing that it tends to invoke an idea of Jewish lites. But this movement is also generally distrustful of all kinds of lites. Sometimes its about the United Nations as the lites trying to wage this war on the white birth rate. Sometimes its about global outsiders. But there is a heavy current of anti-Semitism that links the idea of the manipulative lite with Jewish conspirators.

When people such as Tucker Carlson try to do the respectable version of this, they often say, Oh, were worried about illegal immigration, and they pretend that theyre not saying something quite as bad as what they mean. Its almost always about immigrants, not African Americans. I assumed that was because it would be hard to pretend that African Americans havent been here for a long time. Is this shooters focus on African Americans notable in any way?

The great replacement comes from that novel, The Camp of the Saints, which is specifically about the threat of immigration. So it comes up a lot in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, who was focussed on immigrants as his victims. This document that has been circulated that we believe to be the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo is largely drawn from the Christchurch manifesto. The anti-immigration rhetoric is sort of being used as the frame for an act on African Americans.

In the past few years, weve had a series of mass attacks employing this ideology on different kinds of victim groups: the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the El Paso shooting of Latino folks at a Walmart. The Christchurch shooting targeted Muslim congregations in New Zealand. The Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof targeted African Americans in a church. All of those gunmen share an ideology. They are using the same framing language in their manifestos. Theyre all identifiable as white-power gunmen. This is a movement with a long history.

When you say movement, does that imply a structure or something with leadership?

When I say movement, what Im talking about is a set of groups and actors who are working with a common ideology and with interpersonal connections toward the same end. As a historian, I dont think well be able to see the interconnections for at least another ten years. But theres good reason to think that they are there because this movement works the same way now as it has since the late nineteen-seventies, and theres been no decisive change in how weve prosecuted or surveilled the movement. Theres no reason for it to change its method of organizing.

What weve seen in the earlier period is broad-based interconnection of money; weapons; exchange of ideas; travel between groups; people with multiple memberships; people changing memberships; and social connections such as marriages, churches, counselling services, picking each other up from the airport, staying with each other when they come through town. Its a deeply networked social movement. Its been using the Internet in one way or another since the nineteen-eighties. Its the same movement that has perpetrated a long string of racially motivated attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing. And weve never had a moment of coming to terms with it or of dedicating sufficient resources to stopping its activity.

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Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo - The New Yorker