Voices: Let’s call the Buffalo shooter what he is — a radical MAGA terrorist

Police investigating the shooting at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York (Getty Images)
Police investigating the shooting at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York (Getty Images)
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Republicans won’t even mention the word. They will not use the term ‘radical MAGA terrorism.’

Now, to solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name. They won’t say the name and Donald Trump won’t say the name. But the name is there. It’s radical MAGA terror. And before you solve it, you have to say the name.

That is what Trump said in 2016 during his second debate with Hillary Clinton. Just swap out “MAGA” for “Islamic” and it’s almost a verbatim quote. Accusing his Democratic opponent and his predecessor of both being soft on terror, he insisted that we must name a thing to understand and combat a thing. It’s worth considering that he was not wrong.

Over the weekend, a self-described fascist and white supremacist – 18-year-old Payton Gendron – travelled over 200 miles from his home in south central New York to Buffalo, where he killed 10 people at a supermarket and injured three more. Eleven of the victims are Black, according to early reports, and two are white. This was by design: Gendron deliberately targeted a predominantly Black neighborhood in order to carry out an act of racist terror.

There can be no mistaking that is what this is, because in his rambling and often contradictory and inane manifesto, Gendron makes clear that that he is a terrorist. “By definition yes,” he bluntly answers his own question “Do you consider the attack an act of terrorism?” I’ve found that when terrorists tell you who you are, you should believe them. So, I am okay calling Gendron a terrorist.

MAGA world… is not. While some members of that world, like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, have condemned the attack, they also – to my mind, at least – bear some responsibility for it. Stefanik in particular has been running Facebook ads which promote a conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement” and which falsely claims that immigrants of color are being brought in to “replace” the white populations of western nations.

The bizarre conspiracy theory has been propagated by many who are ostensibly in the mainstream of modern American conservatism. Tucker Carlson regularly makes claims about white Americans being replaced. Democrats, he claims, “are trying to change the population of the United States.” MSNBC presenter Mehdi Hasan tweeted a compilation of clips of Carlson promoting the great replacement theory, insisting that “the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if... you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate – the voters now casting ballots – with new people, more obedient voters from the third world.” This is, Carlson insists, “because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it, that’s true.”

Readers, it is not true. There is no evidence whatsoever to back up this on-its-face insane claim. Yet thanks to people like Carlson and Stefanik, this claim has become so widespread among the GOP base that it is increasingly difficult to divorce the radical conspiracy theorists from the mainstream Republican Party.

After all, Carlson is a veritable mouthpiece of Trumpism, itself a brand of authoritarian populism. His show is the most watched primetime cable news program in America, and his network – the far-right Fox News – had all of the top ten most watched shows. Stefanik, meanwhile, is the number three ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. There are few people who better represent the modern Republican Party.

I want to make it clear that Gendron did not claim that Carlson nor Stefanik was responsible for his radicalization. Instead, he cited websites like 4chan and 8chan, long known by experts to be cesspools of hateful and violent ideologies. A New York Times investigation earlier this month, however, found that Carlson’s producers “sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did.”

The Times found that Carlson has spend more than 50 on-air hours promoting the replacement conspiracy. His views received the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Anglin, who founded the white nationalist Daily Stormer and called Carlson “literally our greatest ally.” If you can judge a man by the company he keeps, I judge Tucker Carlson guilty of radicalizing at least some of his viewers into his far-right and fascistic ideology.

Indeed, we are seeing in real time the consequences of the radicalization of the American right – especially young white men. We saw this with Dylann Roof in the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel. We saw it with Patrick Crusius in 2019 at a Walmart in El Paso. We saw it at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh when the shooter, Robert Gregory Bowers, posted online shortly before the massacre, falsely claiming a Jewish charity that helps resettle immigrants in America “likes to bring invaders that kill our people.” And now we’ve seen it in Buffalo.

Which brings me back to the semantics of terrorism. Everything about this has the hallmarks of a terrorist attack. It is political in nature, part of a wider movement, and driven by a zealous ideology that demands violent action. There is no getting around this. It is what it is.

This is something that, in the past, was understood. When Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, no one flinched at calling it an act of terror. Likewise, it was widely understood that the IRA bombings during the Troubles in Northern Ireland were acts of domestic terror. The Buffalo massacre fits into this same mold – sectarian violence committed in the name of an ideology and political agenda, a means to an eventual end.

Back when Republicans understood terrorism because it was being done by brown people, they often accused anyone who objected to the term “radical Islamic extremism” of being too sensitive – like Donald Trump did to Hillary Clinton in their second debate. But, as Zack Beauchamp of Vox pointed out shortly after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville – when a far-right participant rammed his car into a crowd, killing counterprotester Heather Heyer – Trump never has been able to say “white supremacy” with as much ease.

Indeed, following the attack that killed Heyer, Trump was asked directly by a reporter: “Was it terrorism, in your opinion, what happened?” Trump did not say it wasn’t terrorism, rather saying that asking him to define it gets “into legal semantics” while adding that “what [the driver] did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.” He also memorably said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the rally, ostensibly including the white supremacist side.

Trump’s answer then was telling, and now it is worth exploring in more detail. The former president was right when he said there is a legal difference between murder and terrorism. I don’t think the reporter was asking him, someone with no legal training whatsoever, to parse out the finer points of criminal law, though. Rather, the reporter was asking whether this meets a colloquial understanding of terrorism. Charlottesville did, I think. Buffalo definitely does.

The manifesto is the irrefutable proof. It shows clear intent, clear motive, and that Gendron was acting out a political ideology. “Leave while you still can,” Gendron wrote “to non-whites on White lands,” going on to warn that “as long as the White man lives you will never be safe here.”

Whether Payton Gendron is legally a terrorist will be for the courts to decide. Semantically, though, he is. He was radicalized by the same websites that are radicalizing millions of other young white men like him by promoting the same conspiracy theories senior Republican officials and acclaimed right-wing pundits are promoting. I don’t know how you call him anything but a “radical MAGA terrorist” when he commits an act of violence in the name of MAGA ideology.

I can already hear the chorus of Trump-supporting friends and family claiming, quite indignantly, that they are not terrorists. They might have voted for Trump, but they are peaceful and law-abiding citizens outraged by what happened. And they are right. Not all MAGA supporters or Republicans are terrorists. That should go without saying.

Neither are all Muslims terrorists, far from it — yet the right insisted that we specifically name “radical Islamic extremism.” A pattern has emerged of angry white men committing acts of racist terrorism in the name of an ideology. Surely, according to the right’s own logic, we must also name that.