In light of the shooting on Saturday, May 14, at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the state of gun violence in the United States. What is it about America that makes it the only country where mass shootings happen routinely, only to fade away from media coverage after a matter of days? Besides the fact that violence on a massive scale has been normalized to the point that it warrants disappointment rather than surprise, one must consider the institution of white supremacy to be the root of the problem.
Media influences American culture and multi-billionaire media companies have power. I’ve read article after article about the role of white supremacy in media, calling out political pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity for hawking white nationalist values on platforms like Fox News. Carlson in particular has been known to use inflammatory language, like when he rants about immigration at America’s southern border saying, “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier.” Carlson toes the line when he makes statements about western superiority being jeopardized by increased immigration, shouting that “Our civilization is superior and we need to defend it.” He often dips into outright racist rhetoric, referring to Iraq as “a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys.” No matter what racist and xenophobic language he is spewing, it is televised and channeled directly into our homes, our schools, our workplaces and our values.
A great video by Trevor Noah and The Daily Show illustrates the highs and lows of Carlson’s career and the viewer can watch as his rhetoric becomes more and more unhinged over time, edging into conspiracy theory and blatant disinformation. A concept that is brought up again and again by Carlson, especially when referring to immigrants as “invaders,” is reminiscent of the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that “there’s a conspiracy afoot to diminish the influence of white people.” According to Syracuse, “believers say this goal is being achieved both through immigration of non-white people into societies that have largely been dominated by white people, as well as through simple demographics, with white people having lower birth rates than others.”
But it’s not just Carlson promoting white supremacist values, this ideology is creeping into the mainstream. Other Republican politicians are referencing the Great Replacement Theory as well. Senate candidate Blake Masters, hailing from Arizona, released an interview with Ben Shapiro where he disseminates this idea happening at the US-Mexico border. Masters claims that having open borders is an “electoral strategy by the Democrats” and that Democrats plan to amnesty all of the immigrants and take them as voters.
Apparently, this white supremacist rhetoric is resonating with some Americans, as a recent poll by the Associated Press and NORC has shown. According to the Washington Post, “They found that nearly half of Republicans agree to at least some extent with the idea that there’s a deliberate intent to ‘replace’ native-born Americans with immigrants […] About 3 in 10 Americans overall agreed with the idea that intentional replacement was occurring or that native-born Americans were losing influence. About 1 in 5 agreed that the election system discriminated against Whites. In each case, though, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express agreement or concern.”
White supremacist ideology has been present in a handful of racially motivated mass shootings in the past decade. According to MSNBC, “Before he was indicted on charges of killing 22 people and injuring 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, the identified gunman had been linked to a document posted online that referred to a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas.’” MSNBC maintains that “the terrorist who allegedly killed 13 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 was motivated by white-genocide theories suggesting Jews were orchestrating the resettlement of refugees in order to create a multicultural society that would eventually eradicate whites.” The Buffalo shooter has followed en suite, as “ideas from ‘The Great Replacement Theory’ filled a racist manifesto supposedly posted online by Payton Gendron, the white 18-year-old man accused of targeting Black people in Saturday’s rampage.”
This leaves us with a question. When pundits like Tucker Carlson argue that Democrats are intentionally “importing more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace the current electorate” and secure their own power, does he bear any responsibility for mass shootings motivated by white supremacist rhetoric? The Department of Public Law examines this when they look into stochastic terrorism. “Such speech is plausibly related to violent outcomes and yet falls outside direct forms of incitement. Stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.’”
It all falls into a grey area at this point, deciding what is free speech and what is potentially incendiary language. Ultimately, white supremacy is an American institution whether or not Tucker Carlson spews his racist propaganda on TV. One can’t come out and say Fox News is to blame for every additional racially motivated mass shooting, but when your rhetoric is copied almost word for word in the manifesto of a mass shooter, it might be smart to consider who’s on the right side of history. When the law can’t get involved, it comes down to moral relativism. Don’t be a f***ing white supremacist and especially don’t be a white supremacist on live national television.