On Saturday, 14 May 2022, Tops Friendly Market, a supermarket and community hub in the 1200 block of Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo’s Near East Side neighbourhood, became the scene of a mass shooting, when self-styled 18-year-old White supremacist Payton Gendron shot at thirteen people, including eleven Blacks. Ten of his victims, aged between 32 and 86, died in an incident that has been classed as a racially-motivated “hate crime”. Armed with an AR-15, Gendron recorded the shooting on a helmet-mounted GoPro camera, images from which were briefly shown on livestreamed platform Twitch before being taken down. The alumnus of Susquehanna Valley Central High School had driven 200 miles to the west from his hometown of Conklin in Broome County, which was recorded as 91.9 per cent White in the 2020 US Census, to Buffalo to target a predominantly Black neighbourhood. The East Side of New York state’s second-largest city is a low-income area, where around 78 per cent of residents are people of colour. In the run up to his killing spree, Gendron had shared his views in online posts on the messaging service Discord and on the websites 4chan and 8chan (now known as 8kun), and in a 180-page manifesto. Taken into custody without a struggle, he was indicted by an Erie County Grand Jury on 18 May, with a hearing before Buffalo City Court Judge Craig D. Hannah scheduled for 9 June.
Gendron’s actions appear to have been motivated by the Great Replacement theory, a conspiracy theory according to which global elites, especially Jews, are facilitating the replacement of white Europeans with non-Europeans through mass immigration, just as birth rates continue to decline in White communities. White power advocates in America often refer to the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), an allegedly secretive cabal of powerful Jewish families supposedly controlling business and government with the sinister intention of eradicating the White race. The Buffalo shooting was preceded by other recent shootings carried out for similar reasons- at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019, and at a Walmart Supercenter in El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019.
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, a 1947 book by Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo (Democrat-Mississippi, 1935-47), planted the seeds for a growing belief that White populations faced extinction in racially mixed societies and therefore required protection through physical separation, in a state of geographical apartheid. It then fell to two Frenchmen to amplify and propagate Bilbo’s ideas. Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel, The Camp of the Saints, described the destruction of white, Western society by mass non-white immigration from the Third World. In his 2011 book The Great Replacement, (Jean) Renaud (Gabriel) Camus, specifically concerned about Muslim immigration in France, lamented “reverse colonisation” of White Europe by coloured immigrants.
Other prominent sources for the Great Replacement include William Luther Pierce III’s 1978 apocalyptic novel, The Turner Diaries, which influenced Timothy McVeigh to instigate America’s biggest ever domestic terrorist atrocity in Oklahoma City in 1995, and David Lane’s White Genocide Manifesto of 1995. According to Lane’s two frequently cited ‘Fourteen Words’ slogans: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children”, “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth”. Lane’s manifesto was followed by the Declaration of Independence, published by the Aryan Nations in 1996, which reaffirmed White superiority.
Fox News’ political talk show host Tucker Carlson sums up the concerns of replacementists in his 2018 book Ship of Fools, noting that “a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language”. Carlson has referred to “replacement” on his popular talk show on many occasions in the past, leading Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) to write a letter to his bosses at Fox Corporation and Fox News after the Buffalo shooting, requesting them to “cease and desist” from any amplification of Great Replacement theory on their network.
Fears of “White extinction”, as reflected in falling numbers of Whites, rising numbers of non-White immigrants, and the perceived obliteration of White culture and religion, are fuelling a pan-European movement that demands immigration control, the repatriation of non-Whites, and the geographical separation of Whites and non-Whites- to avoid racial integration, interracial dating and marriage, mixed-race adoptions, and miscegenation-all in the worthy cause of preserving the threatened White race and its shared cultural heritage, language, and religion. Inter-racial sexuality has always been a particular concern for Whites under threat, while more recently there are fears of a growing non-White electorate that might unduly favour the Democratic Party. White extinction anxieties are the result of an unyielding belief in the genetic and cultural superiority of the White race, backed up by eugenic theories, Nordic paganism, Nazi-derived Aryan ideologies, Christian identity, and anti-Semitism.
The Buffalo shootings have prompted New York Governor Kathy Hochul to introduce a series of executive orders targeting domestic terrorism and to propose legislation to close loopholes in existing gun-control laws. For example, the Buffalo shooter used a weapon that was legal in New York state, but had been illegally modified with a high-capacity magazine. It has also emerged that Gendron underwent a mental health evaluation in 2021 after undertaking a project on murder-suicides at his school, only to be released by the police without seeking a “red flag” order of protection-an Extreme Risk Protection Order-which prevents anyone with the potential of being a threat to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing firearms.
The United States has proved to be a fertile ground for those who believe in Great Replacement, whose opinions are protected under the First Amendment. The combination of a ready availability of firearms and widely articulated anxieties about White extinction can be considered root causes for the Buffalo shootings and the deaths of yet more innocent American citizens, caught up in ideological race wars. You may or may not accept Great Replacement theory, but there can be little doubt that such replacement has already taken place, albeit in a different context, as the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia have been dispossessed, decimated, and marginalised by the White settlers who have come to dominate their homelands. Meanwhile, we must await the Buffalo hearings for more insights on White replacement anxieties and cannot feel hopeful, even though we must, that such an incident will not happen again.
Ashis Banerjee