The Daily - The Racist Theory Behind So Many Mass Shootings

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Over the weekend, an 18-year-old man livestreamed himself shooting 13 people and killing 10. Within hours it became clear that the shooter’s intent was to kill as many Black people as possible. The suspect wrote online that he was motivated by replacement theory — a racist idea that white people are deliberately being replaced by people of color in places like America and Europe. What are the origins of this theory, and how has it become simultaneously more extreme and more mainstream?Guest: Nicholas Confessore, a political and investigative reporter for The New York Times. Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Replacement theory, a fringe conspiracy fostered online and espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators.Here are our updates on the Buffalo shooting and the aftermath. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. We begin tonight with breaking news, a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. Witnesses say a gunman dressed in army fatigues and a helmet walked into a supermarket and then opened fire on shoppers and staff. Over the weekend, an 18-year-old man drove several hours from his home to a grocery store in Buffalo, New York,

where he live-streamed himself shooting 13 people and killing 10 of them. You could hear where the gunshots were, how close they were coming, and I said, where's my baby? He said, you didn't see my baby. Where is she? I didn't know where she was. He shot a woman, he shot a deacon,

he shot another woman, and then he went in... Among the victims was a retired police officer, a church deacon, and a grandmother of eight. It's hard to even muster. I just... It's unbelievable. I'm lost forer. I just, it's unbelievable. I'm lost for words.

You know, I frequent this store all the time. I've never been afraid to be here. I am now. I am now. Within hours, it became clear that the shooter's intent was to kill as many Black people as possible. Authorities discovered a hate-filled manifesto filled with racist theories, and an anti-Black racial slur could be seen on the barrel of his assault rifle. Eleven of the victims said to be African-American.

Officials are calling this a racially motivated hate crime. And that he was the latest mass shooter to be motivated by a racist idea known as the Great Replacement Theory. My colleague, Nick Confessori, has been reporting on the origins of that theory and how it is simultaneously becoming more extreme and more mainstream. It's Monday, May 16th. Monday, May 16th.

Nick, where do we need to begin to understand the origins of this theory that keeps showing up in all of these really horrific mass shootings? Michael, at the root of this is the idea that white people in Europe or America are on the losing end and are in some kind of a decline. And you can find variations of replacement theory, as it's called, going back decades. You can look in the 1990s at actual neo-Nazi rhetoric about a genocide against white people. And you can find versions of this in Europe, starting in the 2010s, with the publication of a book in France called The Great Replacement, which held that the elite class in Europe was trying to import a group of Muslims and Africans and Arabs to Europe to replace the native-born white population and the Christian population. And you can find a version of replacement theory in the U.S. more recently, where in place of those

Syrian refugees or Muslim refugees, the villain is South American migrants and Latin American migrants. But all of them have something in common, which is that white people in Europe, in America, in New Zealand are being replaced by people of color. And that this is a deliberate effort on the part of elites in these countries and these parts of the world. Sometimes the elites are under the sway of Jews of elites in these countries and these parts of the world. Sometimes the elites are under the sway of Jews who are orchestrating this great replacement. Sometimes the elites are businesses and political leaders

who want votes from the new arrivals. Like all conspiracy theories, the great replacement provides for some people a comforting and also angering explanation for changes that they see around them. So in the simplest terms, this theory, the replacement theory, taps into the changing demographics of many Western predominantly white countries and the particular fears of white nationalists in all of these places. That's right. In Europe, in the U.S., you have countries that are changing. In Europe, it's partly the result of refugees and migrants from the Middle East. In the U.S.,

you have a growing Hispanic population, partly immigration driven. And what's really striking, Michael, is that in a whole string of mass shootings around the world and in the U.S., we have seen the same theme, replacement, cited again and again. We saw it in the manifesto from the shooter in Christchurch in New Zealand. And we saw it in what law enforcement officials tell us is a manifesto that the gunman in Buffalo posted shortly before his rampage at a supermarket there. And in fact, the Buffalo killer's manifesto was partly cut and pasted from the Christchurch manifesto. And it just shows you how in the

online world where a lot of these people, and it's mostly men and white men, are inhabiting, these ideas freely circulate and bounce around, and they're borrowed and remixed and recirculated. Right. It seems to actually tell the story of how readily this theory weaves its way across the internet. Do we know precisely how this man in Buffalo, this young man in Buffalo, came to discover the replacement theory and to be radicalized by it? So there are some hints in the 180-page document that this man in Buffalo posted before the shooting. And by his own account, he started going on web forums like 4chan and 8chan because he was bored during the pandemic. He got his news from Reddit, and he was finding these ideas on these sources, and they circulate freely there. It's done with irony and humor. It's openly racist.

It is ideas and memes about the inferiority of black people, about the violence supposedly of black people, and a ton of anti-Semitism. There are things he posted in his document, borrowed from elsewhere on the internet, it appears, in which he charts the number of Jews he believes are working at the upper ranks of places like the New York Times and even Fox News. And what binds it all together is this idea that there is an inferior group, a racially inferior group that is outpacing and replacing the racially superior group, which is white people. And that the people moving it along and making it happen, in the case of the Buffalo Killer, are Jews and elites and assorted others. And I'm reluctant to get into the details of what is obviously a very flawed and extreme document.

But how does this shooter justify targeting Black Americans? Because, Nick, from what you said about the replacement theory as it is generally understood in the U.S., it seems to not be especially focused on Black Americans, but instead on those coming from Latin America. So how does he make that connection? Well, here we come back to the idea of how malleable this conspiracy theory is. Most versions of replacement theory, as you can imagine, have a particular group or groups

who are the replacers. And in the document that he posted, he describes black people, and this will echo hoary old racist themes and prejudices. He describes black people as a culture with higher fertility rates that seeks to occupy his people's lands and ethnically replace his people. So he says in this document that all black people are replacers just by existing in white countries. In a Q&A he posted to his followers, he asked himself the question, so why attack immigrants when Jews are the issue? And why attack blacks if high fertility immigrants, as he calls when Jews are the issue and why attack blacks if high fertility

immigrants, as he calls them, are the issue? And he basically says, I'll destroy them one by one, but I'm going to start with these black people in Buffalo. And elsewhere in the document, he asks rhetorically, am I a white supremacist? And he says, yes. white supremacist? And he says, yes. So the Buffalo shooter was an explicit and open white supremacist. He was espousing the most extreme and hateful versions of replacement theory. But what we're seeing now more and more in American life is a version of replacement theory, a variation shorn of the explicit references to anti-Semitic and anti-Black themes. And it's becoming central in conservative politics and media. We'll be right back. So Nick, describe how a variation of the replacement theory

is starting to show up in American media and politics. What we see in more mainstream circles is a version of replacement theory focused on immigration and the problem of legal immigration. There was a poll released last week by the Associated Press that shows that one in three American adults believe that an effort is underway to, quote, replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains. Wow. One third of Americans. One third.

So how do you explain that? Because the platforms that you have mentioned so far as trafficking in replacement theory are not used by all that many Americans. That's right. Most Americans yet are not on 4chan and 8chan, although they're popular with some people, especially young people. But these ideas, or a version of them, are now more broadly circulated. And one place you can find replacement theory is the most popular show on cable news, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. You may have... Right, which was the subject, Nick, of a months-long investigation by you and our colleagues that just published. Correct. Our reporting showed that a variation on replacement theory focused on immigration has figured in over 400 episodes of Carlson's show. Staggering. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, 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. But they become hysterical because that's what's

happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true. Now, the version that you will hear on Tucker Carlson tonight is significantly different than the version you will see on the manifestos of mass shooters in the U.S. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. It is shorn of the anti-Semitism for the most part. It does not blame replacement on Jews. In place of a Jewish conspiracy is a broader cabal of the ruling class, Democrats and Republicans and big business. For Democrats, it's understandable because the calculus is simple. Having abandoned the

concerns of the middle class here, they need millions of new voters and they need them fast. Otherwise, their party risks becoming a permanent minority. Replacing ungrateful citizens with obedient immigrants is their only hope. Every Democrat who's thought it through for even a minute knows this well. Democrats who want more votes and an immigration policy that, in Carlson's narrative, is designed to allow more people in, people who are different than the people who are here already. He is saying night after night that the people who run the country hate the rest of us, hate them, want to destroy them, and are doing it by importing these voters, because in his mind, immigrants are natural

Democrats, and they will eventually create a more democratic electorate. In political terms, this policy is called the Great Replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. Carlson doesn't talk about white people being the equivalent of the native-born, but he does talk about legacy Americans, a term that, until he began using it last fall, was basically only present on white nationalist websites. It didn't exist in the mainstream media.

And then Biden went further. He said that non-white DNA is the, quote, source of our strength. Imagine saying that. It's horrifying. It's different than what you will find on a white nationalist site. But at its core is the same beating heart, which is this fear of demographic changes that are happening mostly naturally and putting a conspiracy behind the change. And when we talk about a show like Tucker Carlson's, we are talking about not a small audience, but a very large one.

It's a very large audience by the standards of cable television, three million people or more on every night. And his audience is 92% white and four-fifths over the age of 54. And it's not just the number of people listening, it's the influence that Carlson has on broader Republican circles, politicians, campaigns, because of his power with primary voters, because his audience is very loyal to him and to Fox, and because they tune in every night. He can really shape the discourse on the right. He can shape what ideas are considered mainstream and acceptable. And so even a version of replacement theory that is sort of sanded down then becomes something that is talked about openly on the top-rated show in

cable news. And Nick, how do we see the more mainstream version of this replacement theory showing up, not just in media, but in politics? You mentioned that it has emerged in politics. So where do we see that? How do we see that? We see more and more examples in recent years, and even in just the past year. Newt Gingrich went on Fox and said that leftists were trying to, quote, drown out what he called, quote, classic Americans. Elise Stefanik, who's the third ranking Republican in Congress, released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting, quote, a permanent election insurrection by granting amnesty to millions of legal immigrants, which she claimed in her ad would, quote, overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington. We saw another Republican congressman, Matt Gaetz of Florida, defend Mr. Carlson's rhetoric in 2021 and say, quote,

Tucker Carlson is correct about replacement theory as he explains what is happening in America. Now, I should be clear that these politicians in their own framings of these issues are not using calls to violence. They are not echoing anti-black rhetoric or anti-Semitism. But in their discussion and attack on immigration, But in their discussion and attack on immigration, I think you can hear and see the two forms of this theory and how they have taken root and been disseminated? The simultaneous mainstreaming of this theory and the extremist, violent iteration of it that we saw over the weekend in Buffalo. saw over the weekend in Buffalo, the relationship between this version that a third of Americans are worried about and perhaps digesting through cable news or the Facebook feed of a lawmaker

and the violent version in which people end up dead. I think that in some ways, both a violent extremist like the gunman in Buffalo and a talk show host like Tucker Carlson are drawing on the same well, the same sewer even, of ideas and anger and fear. And the central fear is that there are many people who are very worried about what the country will be if people who look like them don't dominate it numerically, aren't the default. And there are many people who are upset and who feel that there are too many people coming into the country illegally. That's the emotional wellspring of all of this. And versions of replacement, whether the extreme version that you saw in the manifesto from the Buffalo gunman, or the sanded down version that still calls itself replacement theory, they're all downstream of that fear and they're all harnessing it in different ways. I think that the reason you see

this kind of rhetoric, this style of argument spreading in Republican circles, is because it taps into a genuine worry, and it's a way of generating engagement. And that sounds bloodless, but this is what I mean by that. It generates ratings and retweets. It gets people to contribute small donations online to politicians. It's a powerful and potent idea, even if it's wrong and even if it's sanded down, to make it a little more palatable and to make it sound a little bit less crazy. I think when we see the sanded-down version, the one that sounds a little closer to a broader critique of unchecked immigration,

you start to legitimate the darker version a little. And I think it's all a process. Again, we talk about this idea of mainstreaming, and it might be a tired term. But when you take a attenuated version of an extreme idea and get behind it and promote it as the truth, you've suddenly inched a really big audience a bit closer to the much more extreme version that is out there on the internet waiting for them to find it.

that is out there on the internet waiting for them to find it. Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. On Sunday night, the Times reported that the suspected shooter was detained by police last year after declaring that he planned to commit a murder-suicide. But he was released a few days later and quickly fell off the radar of police. At the end of this weekend's rampage, he appeared ready to fulfill his earlier plan, putting a gun to his neck. But officers persuaded him to drop the weapon and surrender. He now faces first-degree murder charges.

By Sunday night, all ten victims of the shooting had been publicly identified. Retired police officer Aaron Salter Jr. Roberta Drury Celestine Chaney Deacon Hayward Patterson Pearl Young Catherine Massey Margus Morrison

Andre McNeil Geraldine Talley and Ruth Whitfield, the grandmother of aid. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In America's latest mass shooting, a gunman opened fire inside a church in Southern California on Sunday, killing one person and critically wounding four others.

The shooting ended when the gunman was overpowered by congregants who tied him up with an electrical cord and confiscated his weapons. So far, the shooter's motive is unclear. And on Sunday, the head of NATO said that the security alliance would fast-track membership to both Sweden and Finland, in a major setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine was intended to weaken NATO and prevent its expansion. Instead, it now appears to have drawn more countries to the alliance. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Rachelle Banja, and Alexandra Lee Young. It was edited by Lisa Chow and John Ketchum, contains original music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfer of Wunderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.