Well, this story is all over the place — an 18-year-old drove 3 hours to find a black community then implemented a racist terrorist attack on them, killing 10 people all because he believed in a bigoted theory that minorities are being used to “Replace” white people in our nation for electoral reasons.
But it’s not like he just magically came up with that idea on his own, as Joe Scarborough pointed out today on Morning Joe.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blamed a certain cable news network for a white supremacist who gunned down 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store.
[...]
"Fear locks our minds on the past, and it makes us anxious about future," Scarborough said. "Fear allows us to hate people we don't know, and it even makes us forget the best in ourselves. Once again, fear is a tool being used by media moguls and tyrants to target the weakest and most emotionally fragile among us. Fear feeds on the dispossessed minds mired in lost causes like this."
"Like Faulkner's Quintin, whose very body was an empty hall echoing with names, he wrote, 'It was a barracks filled with stubborn, backwards-looking ghosts,'" Scarborough continued. "Like Hitler's Germany, haunted by a shattering defeat after World War I. Russia's Putin, a tyrant who has unleashed terror on an entire continent because he is still stricken a generation later by the collapse of the Soviet Union union or, yes, like that infected appendage still attached to the GOP, the Trump wing, fueled by white grievance and wild conspiracies. Those conspiracies pushed by a former president, House Republican leaders, social media monopolies and a powerful cable news network -- billionaires, they're leveraging that fear to make more money and to gain even more power, by preying on the aggrieved, working to turn white against Black, white against Hispanic, white against Muslim, white against Jew."
"It is the most grotesque of marketing schemes that is killing, yes, literally killing those very Americans whose existence is now being used as leverage by news networks and a political party to breed that fear, to make more money and to win votes," he concluded. "It is sick."
And he wasn’t nearly done.
Later in the day, Joe continued and specifically named check Paul Ryan and Tucker Carlson while reading from a recent New York Times profile of Fox News.
"No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly and relentlessly than Tucker Carlson, who made demographic change a theme of the show since joining the lineup in 2016," said co-host Mika Brzezinski, reading from a recent New York Times profile of the broadcaster. "A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration. Producers sometimes scoured the raw material from the same corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did. It is creeping into everyone's daily viewing across America, fair to say. I don't know if -- I guess that's the mainstream. It is prevalent in a lot of very widely followed figures in media."
Scarborough said the problem was even worse than that.
"Well, I wouldn't call it creeping in," he said. "It is busting in the door, busting through the door. What was so fascinating about the story was that it was actually Fox News executives who were scouring the minutes and trying to push that sort of programming on day side, trying to move that sort of programming across all of the network. Minute by minute to see the ratings, what was working. The Fox News executives were then trying to push that across the entire channel. This is not an isolated case."
"This is the Murdochs and this is members of the board like Paul Ryan, this is their plan," Scarborough added. "They've quite deliberately -- if the reporting in the Times is correct, if the people who worked at Fox News are accurate in what they're saying, this is a network-wide plan, from Rupert Murdoch down. If you read that story and believe that story, the plan is not to just keep it in primetime, but to spread it across the entire channel. That's what Paul Ryan on the board is obviously -- I guess he supports that. I know Paul very well, I didn't know -- sort of surprising, but that's what Paul Ryan, board member, must support. Certainly what the New York Times reports Rupert Murdoch supports."
This sentiment was repeated by Conservative S.E. Cupp on CNN’s New Day.
"I think we need to be careful actually referring to this as fringe based on some of the polling here," Host Berman began. "The AP did a poll: roughly one in three, 32 percent of adults agree that a group of people are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains. How does an idea like this get to 32percent ?"
"Well, right," Cupp began. "I mean, you have to say at the outset what this shooter did was, you know, his decision alone, no one as far as I know told him to go out and shoot up a supermarket."
"But there is a cause and effect to amplifying this garbage, and some of the consequences are intended, right?" she continued. "It stirs up racial animus, ethnic and religious animus, that has the intended effect of turning neighbor against neighbor and getting people angry and afraid. Growing that base that is angry and afraid is part of the consequence, that's how it spreads."
"The next consequence is those people go out and vote for characters who believe in that, folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or name your nationalist or anti-Semitic or conspiracy theorist, those people get elevated," she elaborated. "Finally, those people run, right, and you get more Kathy Barnettes who spew Islamaphobic and anti-LGBTQ stuff, conspiracy theories. They feel empowered to run because this garbage that was once disqualifying has been so mainstreamed by political leaders and far right-wing media that they are not wearing hoods anymore. They are not hiding in the basement, they are out in the open talking about this, you know, openly as if it's no big deal."
Another person who has echoed this sentiment has been Liz Cheney.
"The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse," she wrote before adding, " @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them."
The New York Union leader has taken a hatchet to Rep. Elise Stefanik and her promotion of “Replacement Theory.”
In an earlier editorial condemning Stefanik, New York's Union Leader slammed her for using "alarmist anti-immigrant rhetoric that’s become standard fare for the party of Donald Trump."
"She doesn’t quite attack immigrants directly; instead, she alleges that Democrats are looking to grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants in order to gain a permanent liberal majority, or, as she calls it, a 'permanent election insurrection,'" the editors wrote. "Quite a choice of words, of course, considering that the country is still suffering the aftershocks of the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington by supporters of Mr. Trump who tried to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election."
Rep. Stefanik has, of course, responded to criticism such as this and denied the allegation.
In her tweet, headlined "Disgraceful, Dishonest and Dangerous Media Smears," she included a declaration from senior adviser Alex DeGrasse that "Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement" and labeled the media that reported her previous statements as "groveling hacks."
Yes, this is a “disgusting attack from the Left” although as a point in fact everyone who has brought this issue up so far — is a Conservative. Joe Scarborough. S.E. Cupp. Liz Cheney. All of them are “on the Right.”
But predictably, all you had to do was wait a couple of beats and Stefanik was eager to double down on her despicable racist lies.
"Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity," Stefanik tweeted Monday morning.
"There is nothing humane or compassionate about Joe Biden & Democrats wide open border and amnesty policies. It is Joe Biden’s Border Crisis. A tragic humanitarian crisis. A national security crisis. An economic crisis. And the American people know it," she also tweeted Monday.
Let me pull this post over for a quick reality check. The border is not “Open.” Joe Biden is not implementing “amnesty policies.” Due to right-wing judges the policy of immediately ejecting most migrants due to the CDC’s Title 42 policy, and of requiring asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico” are still in effect.
As of 2021 the Border Patrol under Biden apprehended and dispelled over 1.6 Million migrants that year, which as a point of fact is 3 times the average number of migrants repelled by Trump.
Fiscal Year 2022 runs October 01, 2021 - September 30, 2022.
|
FY17 |
FY18 |
FY19 |
FY20 |
FY21 |
FY22YTD |
Office of Field Operations (OFO) Total Encounters1 |
216,370 |
281,881 |
288,523 |
241,786 |
294,352 |
201,053 |
U.S. Border Patrol Total Encounters2 |
310,531 |
404,142 |
859,501 |
405,036 |
1,662,167 |
1,016,749 |
Total Enforcement Actions |
526,901 |
683,178 |
1,148,024 |
646,822 |
1,956,519 |
1,217,802 |
1 Beginning in March FY20, OFO Encounters statistics include both Title 8 Inadmissibles and Title 42 Expulsions. To learn more, visit: Title-8-and-Title-42-Statistics. Inadmissibles refers to individuals encountered at ports of entry who are seeking lawful admission into the United States but are determined to be inadmissible, individuals presenting themselves to seek humanitarian protection under our laws, and individuals who withdraw an application for admission and return to their countries of origin within a short timeframe.
2 Beginning in March FY20, USBP Encounters statistics include both Title 8 Apprehensions and Title 42 Expulsions. To learn more, visit: Title-8-and-Title-42-Statistics. Apprehensions refers to the physical control or temporary detainment of a person who is not lawfully in the U.S. which may or may not result in an arrest.
In no way is Border Patrol “sitting on their hands” and just letting migrants randomly stream into the country. Also again because of Covid-19 the total number of people who've been granted asylum under the Biden administration has dramatically fallen, even though the success rate of applications has risen.
Under the new Biden administration asylum seekers are seeing greater success rates in securing asylum. While asylum denial rates had grown ever higher during the Trump years to a peak of 71 percent in FY 2020, they fell to 63 percent in FY 2021. Expressed another way, success rates grew from 29 percent to 37 percent under President Biden.
However, with the continuing partial court shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a sustained drop in the number of asylum decisions. This means fewer asylum seekers actually won their cases despite this improving success rate. During FY 2021 just 23,827 asylum decisions were made. This is down from 60,079 decisions during FY 2020. These statistics count all decisions rendered on the merits of asylum seekers' claims.
Even with the greater odds of success, the number of asylum seekers who were granted asylum during FY 2021 was only 8,349 with an additional 402 granted another type of relief in place of asylum. In sheer numbers, this was only about half the number of asylum seekers who had been granted relief during FY 2020. See Figure 1.
Secondly, besides the fact that the Biden administration is behaving like a deportation machine, is the fact that even if more people were being “allowed in” or granted asylum, none of those people would be able to vote.
Even the immigration changes included in the Build Back Better bill, which would have created a pathway to documentation for those who are currently undocumented would not have granted them citizenship which is still required to cast a ballot. So the entire argument that Democrats want more minorities to come into the U.S. in order to change elections doesn't make sense unless they do so by becoming naturalized citizens. Or perhaps these undocumented immigrants have children on U.S. soil which would make them citizens and then in 18 years — they get to vote. So the dastardly Democratic plot is to use illegal immigration to gain a demographic majority 18 years from now? This is all about the election in 2040? Really?
It also doesn't make much sense to attack Black people who are for the most part already here and already voting.
This entire “replacement” idea is utter nonsense.
Nevertheless, that fact hasn’t stopped Republicans before, and it won't stop them now.
Conservative podcaster Steve Bannon on Monday vowed not to back down in promoting a racist conspiracy theory that was allegedly cited by suspected Buffalo gunman Payton Gendron.
On his daily War Room: Pandemic podcast, Bannon insisted reports about the "replacement theory" were meant to distract the public. Bannon has previously promoted a French book that inspired the theory, which claims that white citizens are being replaced by immigrants.
"Of course, all of the morning shows are all over Tucker Carlson and a few others about the replacement theory," Bannon complained. "They seem to miss the point. And here's what we're not going to back off on. For people who have followed this show from day one, we are inclusive nationalists. Right?"
"OK? So, this is not about race," he continued. "This is about American citizenship! This is about the value of your citizens."
Bannon said that he was "not backing off one inch" despite the shooting.
"This is why we're going to take over every elections board in the nation," he remarked. "This is why we're going to take over every medical board in this nation. This is why we're going to take over state legislatures and D.A.s and attorney generals [sic] and secretaries of state and governors. And we're not going to stop. We are ascendant!"
Right, it’s not about race. Just like when the murderous shooter in Christchurch killed 51 Muslims while praising Donald Trump as a “hero” for White people — it wasn't about Race.
And it's not like it was about Race when another shooter in Pittsburg killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue because he also believed in the "Great Replacement" theory.
And it's not like the fucking murderer in El Paso who killed 23 Latinos who he thought were “Illegals” has anything to do with it.
And it's not like Dylann Roof was influenced by the right-wing websites he read to go out and kill 9 black people in Charleston, except that he was.
This type of rhetoric is poison, it's a pack of lies, it's stochastic terrorism.
On top of Bannon we also have Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers who claims that the shooting in Buffalo was a “False Flag" by the Feds.
State Sen. Wendy Rogers, an election conspiracist who spoke at a white nationalist event, posted a message on the social media platform Telegram that speculated government agents had carried out the murder of 10 people at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood, reported HuffPost.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Rogers posted, although she didn't make clear why federal agents would stage the mass shooting.
“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted last year. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists and our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations and other strategies to accomplish this.”
Despite their denials that this is about "race" this Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that there are marked differences between how Democrats and Republicans would react to a candidate who espoused remarks supportive of sexual misconduct, racism, sexism, anti-semitism and homophobia.
Let’s look at this in the inverse for more clarity.
- 34% of Republicans are alright with a candidate who has a history of sexual misconduct.
- 33% of Republicans are alright with a candidate who has a history of domestic violence.
- 62% of Republicans are ok with a candidate who makes racist remarks.
- 75% of Republicans are ok with a candidate who makes homophobic remarks.
- 53% of Republicans are ok with a candidate who makes Anti-semitic remarks.
This is not just being promulgated by Replacement Theory, it's also being pushed by GOP's Critical Race Hoax which basically attempts to push any discussion or admission of slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing discrimination and race out of the public square. It's being pushed by all these calls for “Election Integrity” which is nothing more than blatant voter suppression against minority citizens. This is all part of the demonization of Trans kids and Gay teachers as “groomers” and “predators.” Even the argument that the 2020 election was “stolen” is based on a racist trope that the ballots from predominantly black cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia were somehow “suspect.” None of these are fringe positions or the GOP. These are all central to the Republican agenda. All of it is racism. All of it is bigotry. And every once in a while — it also becomes terrorism.
I think its fair to point out that this particular mass killer doesn't claim that he was specifically inspired by Fox News or a GOP politician to commit his crimes. No, he says that he got his ideas about the “Great Replacement” from Stormfront. It just so happens that the same type of virulently racist rhetoric that is espoused on Stormfront also appears on Fox News and on the official stationery of GOP members of Congress. They are singing the exact same hymnal from the exact same songbook — word or word. Just how many in the rank-n-file GOP have been similarly mind poisoned and radicalized by it?
As Bakari Sellers stated today on CNN: This is who America Is.
Sciutto then asked if "in the barest political terms, are Republicans unlikely to confront this because it works for them at the ballot box?"
"The answer to that question is, yes," Sellers replied before adding, "But Jim, we have to look a lot deeper than this. One, this is not an issue of both sides. This is not an issue of, well, this is just political talk. This is not just one theory or another. No, we're talking about racism. We're talking about this country's original sin."
"What happens in the tragedy in this is that it's a cycle," he continued. "This is who America is. We have this racist attack, we had outrage, we had thoughts and prayers, political back and forth, and then we have an entire cycle where it happens over and over and over again -- and nobody does anything about it."
"The problem that we have now, Jim, is that we have people like George Wallace," he elaborated by referencing the one-time face of segregation and before drawing a direct line from the former Alabama governor to Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. "The difference is George Wallace now has a Brooks Brothers suit and a prime-time TV show. They're able to espouse this nonsense. They're able to espouse this racism."
"This gentleman [the shooter] had 'n*ggers' on the barrel of his gun as he killed the best of us," he continued. "He killed the ladies who sit in the front row of the church and they wear the big hats. When we walk up to them and hug them, they smell like Chanel No. 5, and you'll smell like that all day long, and they give you the pieces of candy and pop you on your hand when you're talking too loud."
"He killed the best of us all because of the color of their skin," he added. "And so Republicans are going to make this any other issue. But until Republicans, face it, this country -- and let's be extremely clear -- white folk in this country combat racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, bigotry -- until we have that conversation, nothing else matters."
Indeed, this is America.
Monday, May 16, 2022 · 9:54:21 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
This is a comment from G2Geek in my last diary.
Also about the racial dimension of this:
It’s sometimes said in these pages that one of the motives for anti-abortionism is ‘Great Replacement’ paranoia: in short, make more white babies.
But as it turns out, the statistics appear to show a that Black women have substantially more abortions than white women, and this appears to have something to do with economic circumstances in other words poverty.
So in fact, banning abortion will if anything, accelerate the Great Replacement, by resulting in the birth of more Black babies than white babies.
You can call this The Great Replacement Paradox.
What’up with that?
I suspect that there’s something in the mix that’s way beyond our wildest nightmares.
Consider the ‘school to prison pipeline.’ Consider the loophole in the 14th Amendment, that bans slavery but for ‘due process of law.’ Consider that prison has been a source of de-facto slave labour.
What happens when you start forcing poor people to have babies against their will? Those babies grow up in poverty, with the high likelihood of getting involved in crime and going to prison. And ending up as de-facto slaves.
So: slavery all over again, one way, or another, or another.
And if that sounds wacko, by all means someone come up with another hypothesis that reconciles the Great Replacement Paradox of abortion.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 · 12:38:31 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
I just heard on Anderson Cooper a college professor put the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto through plagiarism software and found that significant portions of it are copied from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. She also found that the long sections of it which discuss weapon and target selection are clearly intended to help inspire the next deadly shooter and attack.
So that's horrifying.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 · 2:54:00 AM +00:00
·
Frank Vyan Walton
Guess what? Nearly half of Republicans believe the “Great Replacement Theory” is real.
The posts that investigators are looking at include online writings in which Gendron praises other mass shooters who were also motivated by racist ideology, including South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof and the New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant.
Rosenthal told ABC News that there are various "manifestations" of this ideology across the spectrum of the right in the U.S., but that in recent years those expressions have become more "explicit" and have "assumed rhetorical predominance" in the Republican Party.
"The magnitude of how much replacement theory has infiltrated [the] spectrum of the right in this country is something we haven't seen before," he added.
One in three American adults believe in elements of "replacement theory" and 42% of Republicans believe in the theory, according to an AP-NORC poll released in May.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 · 2:58:06 AM +00:00
·
Frank Vyan Walton
Also, an increasing number of Republicans believe that political violence — which is to say Terrorism — is justified.
About 1 in 3 Americans believe that "violence against the government can at times be justified," a year out from the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, a poll by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland out Saturday found.
Why it matters: It's the largest share of respondents to hold that view in similar polls in the last two decades, according to the Post, which said the findings "offer a window into the country’s psyche at a tumultuous period in American history."
- It comes after "last year’s insurrection, the rise of Trump’s election claims as an energizing force on the right, deepening fissures over the government’s role in combating the pandemic, and mounting racial justice protests sparked by police killings of Black Americans," writes the Post.
By the numbers: A majority of adults still say violence is never justified. But that number, 62%, is a new low, per the Post. Some 90% believed it was never justified in the 1990s.
- The new poll found that 40% of Republicans and 41% of independents said violence can be acceptable, compared with 23% of Democrats. Forty percent of white Americans said violence can be justified, compared with 18% of Black Americans.
- Flashback: The percentage of adults who said violence is justified was 23% in 2015 and 16% in 2010 in polls by CBS News and the New York Times respectively, according to the Post.