The massacre committed on Saturday by a white supremacist in Buffalo stems from two great evils that poison American society: those of racism and easy access to weapons. It is then part of the liberation of far-right speech under the presidency of Donald Trump, first revealed by the events in Charlottesville in 2017.
It is serious that, yesterday marginal, the theory of the “great replacement” from which the young Payton S. Gendron was inspired — out of boredom! — now overflows social networks and its purulent propaganda sites to be relayed, more or less explicitly, by Tucker Carlson, the incendiary commentator of Fox News, and a non-negligible fringe of elected Republicans.
Gendron is not a “lone wolf”: he is part of a growing pack.
He is the armed wing of a delusional phenomenon of normalization of hatred against all those who are not white — blacks, Jews, Latinos. In 2018, there was the attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue (11 dead); the following year, the one in a Walmart in El Paso (23 dead), committed by an armed madman who went to war against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”. And how many others. On Saturday, the target was the Tops supermarket in a predominantly African-American neighborhood (10 dead).
Gendron, 18, was pressured into committing the act — and filming it — in the same way that jihadist propaganda inspired a series of attacks in the United States in the mid-2010s.
As disinformation does its work, the result is that one in three Americans, according to a recent Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, believe that operations are being carried out by “elites” to “replace the White Americans born in the country by immigrants, for electoral purposes”.
Elise Stefanik, elected Republican from the State of New York in the House of Representatives, is an ardent apostle of this lie. On her Facebook page, she argued that Democrats were plotting a “permanent election insurrection” by granting amnesty to irregular immigrants in order to create “a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, makes similar remarks, as does now – not without contradicting himself – JD Vance, candidate from Ohio for the Senate for the mid-term legislative elections next November. All dubbed by Trump, of course. But what else can you expect, basically, from a Republican Party that maintains the lie of the stolen presidency and whose upper leadership ruled some time ago that the January 6 assault on the Capitol, in Washington, amounted to “legitimate political discourse”.
Moreover, a politician of the same ilk, capable of the crudest populist shortcuts, presents himself to the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. His name is Pierre Poilievre.
The ability of the Republicans to manipulate the facts and make their lies around the “great replacement” serve them in the polls is nonetheless beyond comprehension.
Before Biden, other presidents (including, in his time, the Republican George W. Bush) tried in vain to find a solution to the migration problems that involved regularizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants. The fact is that under Biden over 1.3 million migrants have been deported from the United States, and his presidency actually continues to enforce many of the restrictive policies that Trump used in the name of his xenophobic sentiments. By speaking absurdly of a Democratic “insurrection”, the Republicans inevitably have a beam in their eye, those who have been struggling for years to retain power by gerrymandering and adoption of laws restricting the right to vote of minorities.
On Monday, alone against all, Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican ostracized by her people since January 6, 2021, accused the leadership of her party to have “facilitated” the expression of white supremacy and anti-Semitismism. His colleagues did not, so to speak, want to hear anything.
The anti-democratic drift of the Republicans is patent. Where will it lead the United States?