The mass shooting in Buffalo has drawn attention to the deeply pernicious “Great Replacement Theory,” a theory boosted by the Far Right and its allies …
The mass shooting in Buffalo has drawn attention to the deeply pernicious “Great Replacement Theory”, a theory boosted by the Far Right and its allies at Fox News and some conservative media. Tragically, the GOP, the party of Lincoln, is making the same mistakes the old Democratic Party did after the Civil War. They are becoming a party whose modern legacy is being defined by violent white supremacists. If we are ever going to stop this sort of home-grown white supremacist terrorism, it is going to take all of our leaders doing everything they can. It is time for national Republicans to go to Buffalo and reflect on the racist mass killing there, as well as the lives of great Republicans Frederick Douglass and Jack Kemp, who were both connected to that area. Douglass was born into slavery and became one of the greatest anti-slavery crusaders. He gave important abolitionist speeches in Buffalo and lived in nearby Rochester, where a statue of him has been repeatedly vandalized in recent years. Kemp was a former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who ran for president as a Republican and a card-carrying member of the NAACP. The young man charged with Saturday’s killings was allegedly inspired by racist and anti-Semitic theories about powerful forces scheming to replace white people in this country with Black people and immigrants. The Great Replacement Theory is deadly. It has inspired previous mass murderers who killed Jewish people in Pittsburgh, Latinos in El Paso, and Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.
