The Right Wants You To Stop Talking About The Buffalo Shooter's Ideology

By Eoin Higgins, The Flashpoint

On Saturday, an 18-year-old man named Payton Gendron killed 10 people in a TOPS supermarket in Buffalo.

Of the 13 people Gendron shot, 11 were Black—in his livestream of the shooting, he’s heard saying “sorry” to a white man he shoots. The other victims seem to have been hardly even spared a thought.

Gendron’s motivations for the shooting were made clear in a 180-page manifesto he published online. The far-right document, which included multiple anti-Semitic references and made clear he was expressly targeting the store and area because of the area’s large Black population, left little to the imagination.

The manifesto included a nearly word-for-word repeat of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interpretation of the racist Great Replacement narrative, a far-right conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and/or Jews are trying to dilute the white American electorate by importing immigrants of color.

Tucker, Tucker, Buffalo shooter pic.twitter.com/Z4jcOJSUmf

— ℮oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 14, 2022

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s paid even the slightest attention to Carlson over the past few years. The TV dinner heir and child of total privilege who claims to speak for the common man has long had an affinity for the most racist of conspiracy theories.