On Saturday, a teenage gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black. Just before he went on his murderous rampage, the shooter posted a manifesto rife with racism and xenophobia in which he claimed that white Americans are under siege and are being replaced by non-whites, non-Christians and immigrants.
The substance of that manifesto is not original. Rather, it has ties to the "great replacement" conspiracy, which states that non-whites are being brought into the United States and other western countries to "replace" white voters in an effort to advance a liberal progressive political agenda that is, allegedly, destructive to western society and which will lead to the extinction of the white race. While appeals to so-called "white genocide" are often made by adherents to great replacement, the conspiracy is also frequently invoked in the form of claims that immigrants are an invading force. When given voice in the United States, that part of the conspiracy assumes that immigrants and non-whites will vote for Democrats, overwhelming the voting power of white Americans.
The Buffalo gunman is not the first mass shooter to cite great replacement conspiracy talking points as a justification for his violence. The same theories motivated mass shootings that led to the deaths of nine Black people in a church in South Carolina in 2015; 11 members of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018; 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019; and 23 primarily Latino persons at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the same year.
But it's not just a conspiracy advanced by mass murderers. It is, increasingly, one endorsed by putatively mainstream political figures. People like the man favored to be Ohio's next senator, J.D. Vance.
Vance has spent a great deal of time of late giving voice to some of the central talking points of the great replacement conspiracy, particularly as it relates to immigrants "invading" the United States and voting for Democrats. In an early April debate, Vance, on the defensive for dismissive comments he made regarding the war in Ukraine, said that Ukraine was "not our fight,” but rather, that it was a "massive distraction" from the "border invasion" occurring in the United States. The day before that debate, Vance dropped an ad in which he lamented "Joe Biden's open border," which will lead to "more Democrat voters pouring into this country."