White supremacism takes up arms in America

Saturday May 14 might not be another day of violence in the United States.

There was a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo that killed 10 people and wounded three others, but that's hardly unusual;

according to data from the independent organization Gun Violence Archive, it was number 198 so far this year.

That's about 10 per week (in 2021, 693 were recorded).

After the arrest of the suspect, a customary ritual also began in these cases: collective mourning and stupor broadcast live, words of comfort from the president and calls to reopen the debate on arms control, a recurring toast to the sun in a country with more pistols (about 390 million) than inhabitants (332 million).

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The buffalo shooter's descent into the underworld of supremacism

This time, at least, there was an unexpected ingredient: the motivation of the shooter, an 18-year-old named Payton Gendron, who chose to sow his terror in the district with the highest concentration of black population in the State of New York, has placed the spotlight on two poisons on the rise in recent years in the United States: white supremacy and domestic terrorism (in 2020, there were 107 such attacks, more than double the previous year, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies).

Both poisons intoxicated the boy through social networks such as 4chan and 8chan, who left a 180-page manifesto that can be read like breadcrumbs on his path to hatred, which began with the pandemic.

Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron appears in court Thursday.

BRENDAN MCDERMID (REUTERS)

His great inspiration was Brenton Tarrant, author of a massacre of 51 Muslims in Christchurch (New Zealand).

He also broadcast his shooting live and also posted a justification online, which he titled

, like the theory originally coined in 2011 by French far-right philosopher Renaud Camus, which argues that left-wing elites, with a little help from the Jews are trying to destroy the white race in the West by diluting it with interracial marriages, unchecked immigrant inflows, and advances in minority voting access.

Gendron aspired to join the lineage of Dylann Roof —who killed nine black parishioners of a church in Charleston (South Carolina)—, of Robert Bowers, —murderer of 11 Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh—, or of Patrick Crusius —who took out 23 Latinos and immigrants in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—.

The Buffalo shooter wrote those and other names in white letters on the AR-15-style rifle with which he shot into the supermarket.

The gun also sported the slogan White Lives Matter.

One in three US citizens believe in replacement

A recent poll by the Associated Press advises against taking these crimes as the follies of a bunch of poor devils cut off from the world, but with a good internet connection and access to deadly assault weapons.

According to that survey, one in three adult Americans believes in a more or less radical version of the great replacement theory, in part, thanks to the promotion that some members of the most extreme wing of the Republican Party and stars like Tucker have made of it. Carlson, who hosts the most watched program on cable television in the United States on Fox News (with an audience of up to 4.5 million viewers).

As always with Carlson, the picture of cynicism, it's hard to know how much is really believed in what he says (it was never possible to clarify either;

the chain did not respond this week to several requests from EL PAÍS seeking a comment from the announcer).

What seems clear is that he says it a lot: he has cited the replacement theory in more than 400 programs according to an investigation by T

Also, that many of his viewers do buy those ideas.

Protest rally against the massacre of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, last Friday. LINDSAY DEDARIO (REUTERS)

Behind them, lies the assumption that as soon as 2045, according to the Census Bureau, whites (49.7%) will no longer be the majority in the United States, since they will begin to add less than Hispanics (24.6%), blacks (13.1%) asians (8.8%) and other ethnic groups (3.8%).

How the idea of ​​such a "minority majority" will affect the balances of power between Democrats and Republicans is a big topic of debate in the United States.

In a telephone conversation, the essayist Yascha Mounk, a sharp analyst of populism in the world, considers it dangerous to present these data "as a clash between two mutually hostile blocs: the whites, against the rest."

“Both parties use that rhetoric to their advantage: Democratic strategists assume it will tip the electoral scales in their favor, while Republicans stir up fear, when nothing is so clear cut;

look, for example, at how many Latinos voted for Donald Trump in the last elections or keep in mind that the most extreme candidate for the primaries in Pennsylvania [Kathy Barnette] is an African-American woman,” argues Mounk, who deals with the great replacement in his recent edited

(Penguin Press; in Spanish it will be released in the fall by Paidós).

In it, he argues that the fundamental challenge for democracies of our time will be to deal fairly with increasingly diverse societies (and he is quite optimistic that this will be possible).

This is not the first time that the United States has faced the challenge of diversity.

“It is a classic in our history.

The arrival of millions and millions of Asian and Mediterranean immigrants at the end of the 19th century is a good example.

Another is the height of racist violence after World War I, when there were not only lynchings of blacks, but entire communities were destroyed," warns Donald Yacovone, a researcher at the Hutchins Center for African American Studies at Harvard University, who adds that the idea of ​​the superiority of the white man goes back much further.

“It has deeper roots than any other aspect of American culture, more than democracy or republican values,” he clarifies.

"That's why, those who have been educated in those lies about his superiority,

Supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, considered a terrorist group by US authorities, protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2017 over the removal of a Confederate statue.

Chet Strange (Getty Images)

To demonstrate the persistence of these ideas, Yacovone has written a forthcoming essay entitled

(Pantheon), in which he reviews how education in this country has spread them "from the Founding Fathers until today."

In the "close to 3,000 textbooks" studied, he has found, he says, "really appalling examples."

“Even now, when the programs are more sensible, it does not matter, because many parents, especially since the pandemic, opt for home schooling, and teach their children manuals from decades ago, because they consider them more patriotic.

They don't like how contemporary America is educated and are terrified by concepts like Critical Race Theory."

That school of critical analysis, which interprets racism as an endemic evil that permeates American life and should be thoroughly taught in order to neutralize it, is one of the great battlefields of the current culture war.

"The worst thing is that the Republican Party," adds Yacovone, is kidnapped by a demagogue [Donald Trump] capable of doing anything to gain power and to stay in it: annul elections, deny the right to vote to many people and encourage white supremacy.

Whatever it takes".

Rebound since Trump's victory

Pointing to the irony of Gendron attacking a black neighborhood ("our presence on this earth dates back to the 18th century, we're not replacing anyone"), African-American historian Nell Irvin Painter agrees that "supremacism has always been there, but it is experiencing a rebound since Trump came to power.”

“What's terrifying in this case is the sum of those toxic ideas and an 18-year-old's access to assault weapons meant for war;

machines that can kill 10 people in two minutes”, adds Painter, author of the influential essay

(W. W, Norton), which goes back to the Greeks to weave the history of the idea of ​​the white man through of the times.

It was a success when it was published in 2010, in the middle of the Obama era, the president with whom the United States was called to finally embrace "the end of the racial conflict" (which,

, never came).

“Everything changed with Trump, already a racist, surrounded himself with people like Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, who we know had links to terrorist groups banks.

They helped bring those ideas out of the margins,” he considers.

Bannon, who decisively collaborated in opening the doors of the White House to the tycoon, stopped working in the Government in the days following an ultranationalist demonstration in Charlottesville that in the summer of 2017 resulted in the death of a young activist of left that went to the city of Virginia to oppose the celebration of the racist protest.

That march meant the coming out of the closet of small groups and militias of extreme nationalism that, with names as eloquent as the Proud Boys (proud boys), the Three Percenters (those of three percent, the proportion of settlers who supposedly rebelled against the English during the American Revolution), the First Amendment Praetorians (praetorians of the First Amendment) and the Aryan Nations (Aryan nations),

They took the lead in the attack on the Capitol.

After the assault on January 6, for which some of their leaders are being tried, these organizations have chosen, according to the South Poverty Law Center, to "soften their edges to dilute themselves in the prevailing discourse."

Brendon Tarrant, sentenced to life in prison for the 2019 murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Pool (Getty Images)

It seems clear that Gendron fished those ideas far from the main river, in the darkest tributaries of the internet, a kingdom of conspiracy, in which fascist memes, adulterated statistics and false information are mixed, which adolescents consume without sufficient weapons to discern what real from what is not, according to the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

“It was on social networks where he found another of his references, which is not being talked about much: the novel

(1977), by William Luther Pierce”, points out the writer Ishmael Reed, one of the most respected voices of the black community in the United States and also one of the most uncomfortable.

Defined by the FBI as the "bible of the racist right", it recounts a violent revolution that overthrows the government, unleashes a nuclear war and an ethnic conflict that ends with the extermination of the entire "non-white" population.

Reed, who advises not to settle for just accusing Carlson – "he is a mere employee, let's better point to the Murdochs [owners of Fox News]" – recalls that

was also among the bedside readings of another racist dangerous, Timothy McVeigh, perhaps the most famous domestic terrorist in American history.

In 1995 he killed 168 people in a car bombing in Oklahoma City.

"The Buffalo killer was also looking for that kind of fame," says the author of

(1972), an anti-racist satire that entered the select club of Penguin classics in 2017.

The Oklahoma City federal building that was the target of Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing. Jim Argo (AP Photo/The Daily Oklahoman)

Visiting Buffalo to meet with families of the victims, President Joe Biden on Tuesday spoke of "white supremacism" as a "poison" and of Gendron as "a domestic terrorist."

He also promised that he would try to get some sort of gun control legislation through the Senate, at least to restrict access to assault weapons, but for that he needs a supermajority that Democrats lack.

And in his words, both empathy and electoral calculation resonated: in this year of appointment at the polls, which does not look good for theirs, both parties are engaged in a fight without rules to see who can make the other look like the greatest threat to democracy.

At the moment, the Democratic governor of New York, a native of Buffalo, announced on Wednesday that she will toughen the laws on possession of weapons in the State and will investigate the social networks where Gendron was intoxicated.

Letitia James, Attorney General of New York, has launched, for her part, an investigation into the responsibility of 4chan and 8chan in the radicalization of the shooter, and what went wrong on the platforms Twitch (where the video was broadcast) and Discord ( that hosted your manifest).

New York Attorney General Letitia James (wearing a blue jacket) attends a vigil for the Buffalo supermarket victims on Sunday, May 15. SETH HARRISON/USA TODAY NETWORK (via REUTERS)

Last Tuesday in Buffalo, James was walking with a bouquet of flowers through the cordoned off area around the supermarket where the massacre took place.

In a conversation with EL PAÍS, he acknowledged that "much more must be done to prevent something like this from happening again."

"But above all, it is urgent to ensure that the arms

stop holding Congress hostage," added the attorney general.

It will be difficult.

In 2020, the manufacturers experienced the best year in their history, with 22.8 million units sold in the United States.

The second best year was 2021.

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