Buffalo shooting suspect duped by 'replacement theory' that's now part of the GOP playbook

We need to be honest about the conspiracy theory that supposedly motivated the 18-year-old suspect charged with killing 10 people and wounding three others at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, N.Y., on Saturday.

Payton S. Gendron is said to have bought into the “great replacement” conspiracy, a racist, xenophobic lie that initially claimed that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with people of color. (Now it’s also progressives, liberals and Democrats who are part of the conspiracy.)

This used to be the kind of vile bilge that only the kookiest of kooks would spread, or fall for. But not anymore.

We need to be honest about where a young man now could hear such a nasty falsehood and come to believe it. Certainly it’s available online at the fanatical edge of the internet. And Gendron seemed to have spent time there.

But the dangerously gullible among us don’t need to seek out sinister rhetoric in the dark shadows of the web anymore.

The lunatic fringe goes mainstream

Because “replacement theory” isn’t only being spewed by the lunatic fringe.

It is being spewed by the lunatic mainstream.

It is being spewed, for example, by Fox television host Tucker Carlson.

And it is being spewed by Republican candidates for public office all over the country.

Including Arizona.

I wrote about this just last week, talking about how “replacement theory” began with a book published in France. And how it was picked by the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, carrying their ridiculous tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

And how it was quickly adopted by nativists here and expanded to: “You will not replace us.”

From Fox's Tucker Carlson to Arizona

Fox host Carlson has repeated the claim on his show, saying that President Joe Biden wants “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration.

He also said things like, “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

What’s worse, that kind of incendiary talk has become standard campaign rhetoric for Republican political candidates – something straight out of the GOP’s 2022 playbook.

In Arizona we’ve heard several variations of it, often talking about an “invasion” of immigrants, from Republican Senate candidates Mark Brnovich, Jim Lamon and Blake Masters. And from GOP candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake. And from others.

These politicians are aware that nearly a third of Americans have bought into the “replacement theory” lie.

Taking responsibility for lives lost

They also know that people have died because of it, both here and abroad.

There was the Aug. 3, 2019, shooting in El Paso, for example, in which a gunman opened fire inside a Walmart, killing 23 people and injuring 23 others.

And the Oct. 27, 2018, mass shooting that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And there was the horror in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people were shot to death and 48 injured in attacks at two mosques.

In addition, we have “replacement theory” believers and promoters like Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who seems willing to expand the conspiracy even further by suggesting that a massacre like that in Buffalo was a “false flag” orchestrated by the federal government.

It’s sick. And it’s getting people killed.

The deeply disturbed, radicalized individuals who carried out these crimes – as well as the foolish, impressionable potential killers who may be in that murderous pipeline – no longer need to get their racist, xenophobic rhetoric from the lunatic fringe.

They can get it from the lunatic mainstream.

It's a killer campaign strategy. Literally.

And the people spewing it need to own that.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Buffalo shooting suspect bought into GOP campaign rhetoric