Buffalo Gunman Pleads Guilty To Hate Crimes, Will Spend Rest Of Life In Prison

The rhetoric that inspired him, however, will be freely spread on Fox News and social media.

In May of this year, 18-year-old white supremacist Payton Gendron walked into a Tops Market in Buffalo, New York, and killed ten people, most of them Black. He did this because he was very upset about the "Great Replacement," a bizarre conspiracy theory promoted in its various incarnations by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Fox News   talking heads. He was afraid the Left was conspiring to replace white people like him with people of color, for reasons.

Now 19, Gendron will spend the rest of his life in prison. He pleaded guilty today in an Erie County, New York, court to 10 counts of first degree murder, 10 counts of second degree hate crime murder and a charge of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. He still faces federal weapons and hate crime charges.

 As we wrote at the time:  

Gendron drove 200 miles from Conklin, a town on the southern tier of New York state, in order to kill Black people. More than that, he wanted to scare Black people. Because that's what terrorism is, isn't it? It wasn't just about taking those particular 10 lives, destroying those particular 10 families, on that particular day. It was about trying to make people scared to get food, to go to the grocery store, to do anything — because there could be another one of him anywhere.

In his manifesto, Gendron explained that he hadn't considered himself a racist before the pandemic, but that during it, he spent a lot of time on 4chan and the Daily Stormer and became increasingly convinced of this evil imaginary plot [the Great Replacement]. Then he read about other white supremacists who had committed mass murder because they, too, were convinced liberals were trying to replace them — Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, Dylann Roof in the States -- and he thought to himself "Why not me?"

This theory, whether it's been called that or not, has been around for decades. Most people will date it back to the work of French crackpot Renaud Camus's 2011 essay "Le Grand Remplacement," in which he claimed that white citizens of European countries were being replaced by Black and Middle Eastern immigrants, or back to the "White Genocide" nonsense of 1990s white supremacists, but it's always been there. A major feature of early 1900s antisemitism and racism in the United States was that Jewish people were supporting Black civil rights struggles because they wanted to replace WASPs with Black people and then take over the world.

Gendron is responsible for his crimes, but the fact is, he's not the only one. While there was a time when the Great Replacement and related theories were relegated to the right-wing "fringe," they are not fringe anymore. They're not even disguising their white supremacist and antisemitic rhetoric as "ironic" or as "just meant to test the limits of free speech" anymore, as many have recently felt the need to do, at least in the pre-Trump-escalator days.

This nonsense is mainstream, it is promoted on Fox News with great regularity, it is promoted by people meeting with the former president of the United States of America.

There had been some progress with getting some of the more extreme promoters of this bullshit off of social media, but that respite will be ending soon. Elon Musk has announced that "amnesty" for all banned Twitter accounts will begin next week, and that will include people like David Duke and Andrew Anglin, the proprietor of The Daily Stormer, one of the sites Gendron cites as inspiring him to go and shoot up a Tops Market in Buffalo in May.

Just last week, Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others shared a tweet containing a list of people they demanded be reinstated on Twitter. Anglin was on this list. 

As with the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last week, the Right had no real "Maybe we should tone down our rhetoric and not promote extremist rhetoric" moment after the Buffalo shooting. If anything, they were defensive, as they are now. That rhetoric is apparently more valuable to them than human lives, even more valuable to them than advertising dollars. It's supposed to scare people like Peyton Gendron into voting for Republican politicians, but it also, unfortunately, seems to very frequently have the effect of inspiring them to commit mass murder.

Putting Peyton Gendron behind bars for the rest of his life is fine — I don't even believe in life sentences and I'm hardly going to object — but it's also an individualized solution to a mass problem that is not going away anytime soon and is in fact becoming more and more of a threat every day.

[ New York Times ]

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