How are we supposed to make sense of this? (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
After the horrific racist mass shooting of 13 people — 11 of them black — in a Buffalo, New York supermarket, it is vital to ask what caused such violence. For some progressives, the answer is already clear: Republicans, notably Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, have blood on their hands because they endorse the “Great Replacement” theory that the shooter, Payton Gendron, referenced in his 180-page manifesto. This is the same phrase used by the El Paso shooter, who targeted Latinos, and by Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch killer whose victims were Muslim.
The Great Replacement theory argues that an elite cabal, often Jewish, sometimes Leftist, seeks to “replace” Western whites with minority immigrants. Like any conspiracy theory, it has is a kernel of truth upon which the fantastic elements are grafted. Many mainstream and liberal writers have drawn attention to the ethnic transformation of the West. The term “replacement population” has a long history of use by demographers and geographers. In Western countries, whites are a smaller share of the population than they were in 1960, and I suspect this is why many French or Americans think replacement is real.
On the other hand, there is no evidence that Jews have had much influence over such changes, and while the Left has sometimes celebrated demographic change or sought to capitalise on it electorally, the claim that Leftists orchestrated this change is not credible. Immigration policy in the US has long been driven by short-termist rather than long-termist considerations. Indeed, the Democratic architects of the transformational Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 claimed it would not alter the ethnic composition of the United States. There is no evidence they believed otherwise.
Do Tucker and Trump bear responsibility for Buffalo? From a social scientific standpoint, this account is plausible, but so are several others. Vivid images and emotions often lead us to snap judgments that are highly prone to confirmation bias. In order to surmount such biases, the scientific method asks us to step back from emotive data points, entertain competing theories, and open our own explanations up to falsification.
Consider the following hypotheses on how media and political narratives might influence mass shootings like the one in Buffalo:
1. Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump and the Republicans are to blame.
Trump spoke of “fine people” among the Charlottesville rioters, and Carlson has said 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”. A number of others, including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, have endorsed the theory that lax border enforcement is a deliberate Democratic policy to improve its electoral fortunes. These comments could have created the narrative mood music within which the shooter operated.
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SubscribeThe whole premise here: “Person does horrible thing X because he believes Y” needs to be questioned. Far too often a better way to look at things is “Person wants to do horrible thing X. He then finds a pretext, Y to justify doing it.” This is entirely well understood when the ‘horrible thing’ is to eat the piece of cake now, when and the pretext is one of ‘there won’t be enough to go around when the others arrive’, ‘because my blood sugar is low now’, ‘I deserve it after having to listen to that windbag drone on and on in that boring meeting I was forced to attend’ or ‘I skipped desert yesterday’. Playing whack-a-mole with the pretexts will not work because the human mind will always invent new ones. There will always be a new reason to do what you wanted to do anyway.
I do not know why this notion of man as rationalising agent rather than reasoning agent is so very difficult for large numbers of intellectuals to accept, when the thing wanted to do is truly horrific. So much of recorded history documents how common the impulse to this sort of behaviour is. Somehow their brains cannot grasp the concept of doing evil for its own sake, because somebody wants to do it.
Constant anti-white rhetoric, not infrequently genocidal in expression, which is tolerated, even condoned (and therefore encouraged) by the woking-class is bound, ultimately, to influence unstable white people who are minded to view conspiracy theories as real.
..or ‘liberal societies must accept [some?!see WEF’s plans] loss of their freedom to enjoy their safety’? There are things liberality can stomach that I cannot: rights championed for anything and anybody, no matter how vile; responsibilities, – individual and corporate – not so much. As for me and my family, we pin our red lines on the 10 Commandments – a now widely scorned practicality – that has however (despite acknowledged abhorrent abuses) held the moral overtones for human behaviour for millennia. This present day anti-God culture produces a moral vacuum. And what does a vacuum prefer.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.
Attribution: Thomas Jefferson
It took me seconds to establish the original quote by Ben Franklin. I read Unherd for the quality of its Comments. Please do not degrade that.
‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
“political and cultural outlets for grievances, if blocked, can force sentiment into highly insulated extremist bubbles, increasing the risk of violence. Conversely, when terrorists participate in politics, they tend to moderate”
This is the most crucial point, in my view. Notice how there was a collapse of support for groups like the BNP when mass immigration began to be (briefly) discussed in the British political debate in the 2010s. Given the recent figures, the sure to be incendiary census results and increasingly anti-white rhetoric from large sections of the commentariat we’ll likely see a massive surge in political extremism, due to the inability of politicians to deal with the situation.
I had sliced that phrase out for pasting too before I saw your comment.
This is the problem with courts eliminating issues from the political process. The most significant of these in America was the 1857 Dredd Scott decision, which ruled that Congress could not regulate slavery. However the same dynamic is visible in abortion currently.
In America, we have 2 political parties that fundraise on maximal abortion positions (“zygote = baby” vs “abortion up to halfway out the birth canal”). Very few Americans believe either of these positions rigidly. Since the American Supreme Court made political solutions to abortion impossible in 1973 (just like Dredd Scott, by adopting one side’s essentially maximalist position as “law”) though, the pressure just builds without release.
(I recently started a discussion on Bari Weiss’ substack about abortion, and we found that despite putting different labels on ourselves — 70% lib / 30% cons, roughly — we were able to sketch out an abortion regulation regime that all 30-40 of us involved in the discussion said we could live with. But actually implementing such a regime is impossible right now in America.)
Contrast this to Europe, which never experienced this judicial usurpation of such a fundamental political issue. As a result, EU countries generally settled on 12 week abortion limits — democratically. Despite pro-life/pro-choice venom from across the Atlantic, my understanding is that abortion is largely a non-issue in Europe, because it was solved by political compromise instead of judicial fiat. France just modified their law to 14 weeks, and while some folks were certainly disappointed, I haven’t heard of any threats to storm the National Assembly over it. (Progressives are widely threatening to storm the American Supreme Court on this side of the pond, and many media pundits are cheering them on.)
Political violence only becomes thinkable when all other outlets for political expression are closed. Judicial usurpation is achieves that closure, but there are others, broad media censorship and social stigma both high on that list. Americans have experienced both in spades in the last 5 years. In the EU, the problem is unelected regulations at the trans-national, European level. Why is the National Front rallying? Because Le Pen talks about issues everyone else considers untouchable.
If you want less political violence, you have to allow more political debate. After all, politics is just war continued by other means.
What about the hypothesis that identity politics itself, pushed by a certain brand of the left since the 1960s, is what has caused the rise of white identity politics?
White nutters seeing the world through race is an entirely obvious end point of casting white people as the enemy. When white people are told that the world is a zero sum game of groups competing for power, why, as Jordan Peterson points out, would they not play to win? Why would a proportion of them not see it as a war when they are constantly told it’s a war?
Playing identity politics against white people works very well in a place like South Africa, where whites have no hope of leveraging their numbers to act as “the other”.
But in places where whites are a majority, playing identity politics is disastrous for minorities, who will inevitably bear the brunt of a population that comes to see them as the enemy and who can elect leaders to turn the tables on those same minorities.
The woke say they are helping minorities when in fact they are making their lives far more difficult.
Article dismissed. The writer trots out “fine people on both sides” as proof of Trump’s “racism” knowing full well the statement was mangled and regurgitated ever since. The issue on which Trump was commenting was the tearing down of historical monuments. He said there were fine people on both sides of the removal/keep argument, as there indeed were. That this writer ignores that simple fact exposes him as a purveyor of lies whose work cannot be trusted.
I don’t know if you’ve read the article properly – he offers Trump’s “racism” as a hypothesis of one particular camp of people, not his own personal view.
“Immigration policy in the US has long been driven by short-termist rather than long-termist considerations.”
Isn’t this true of ALL policies at the federal level of American government?
“I’m not a free speech absolutist. There is a point at which a proven risk of serious violence is a legitimate reason to restrict speech.”
An enemy of free speech is an enemy of the people.
Im not sure if you condemning the author for accepting some limitation on free speech. My own view is that a society ought not to allow completely unrestrained speech, it obviously being dangerous to do so. I would replace the word ‘violence’ with ‘injury’. This follows the very simple English common law dictum that one cannot mischievously shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. If one accepts the very good sense of that rule one accepts some limit on free speech. However, I do accept that once a concession is made to limit speech the floodgates open and erosion starts. That is the rub.