Republican Party is White Supremacist

I’m fairly certain that the Top’s Supermarket massacre in Buffalo, NY last weekend will generate more arguments about the Second Amendment but all I’m going to say about that is; what about the right 13 people shot to live their lives and shop for groceries safely? Oh, and one other thing, the “good guy with a gun” argument doesn’t hold water since retired police officer Aaron Salter shot the perpetrator but since the perpetrator was wearing body armor it was ineffective and then Salter was shot down.

The massacre was planned and prepared for over a period of months. The perpetrator carried a rifle and fired upwards of 50 rounds, wore a bullet proof vest, a tactical helmet with a video camera mounted on it so he could live stream the murder of innocents. The shooter was apparently radicalized online by white supremacist/neo-Nazis. In March 2021 the Director of National Intelligence warned that racially-motivated extremists posed the most lethal domestic terrorism threat. It said the menace was now more serious than potential attacks from overseas.

Don’t think for a moment that this is just some loons winding each other up online. White Supremacist ideology and rhetoric has a large presence in the Republican Party nation-wide. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited the "domestic supply of infants" as reasoning for overturning Roe v. Wade while the Buffalo shooter's manifesto focuses on "white birth rates." This isn’t a coincidence.

Representative Elise Stefanik replaced Liz Cheney as the #3 Republican in the House when Cheney demanded the truth about Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Stefanik launched a Facebook ad campaign pushing the same “white replacement theory”, aka “great replacement theory”, cited as impetus for the Buffalo mass murder.

Like Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Stefanik uses violence-provoking conspiracy claims to further her own career but refuses to take any responsibility for the deaths caused when violent believers decide that terrorism is the only solution. The "great replacement" conspiracy is now widespread in Republican rhetoric; there is now no great difference between the conspiracies of neo-Nazism and those of Republican Party "leadership".

The theory has been cited by several other mass shooters since 2018, including Robert Bowers who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 and Patrick Crusius who murdered 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart.

Last December, the Associated Press and NORC conducted a large national poll and found that nearly half of Republicans agree to at least some extent with the white supremacist/neo-Nazi propaganda that there’s a deliberate intent to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants.

Republican leaders are making a direct attack on our democracy using white supremacist propaganda to motivate voters to vote for them. This is how fascists came to power in Europe in the 1930’s.

Where does the country go from here? The people of this country must decide is if we want to live in a world where fear and division are able to take root, because after you dehumanize everybody that’s when the killing start. Do you remember the 1994 Rwandan genocide? It started much like what we’re seeing now in the United States with the majority ethnicity blaming a minority group for their problems. Then the finger pointing turned into murdering their neighbors.

Inciting a riot is a federal crime with a penalty of 5 years in prison, shouldn’t there be a penalty for inciting mass murder?

In my book anyone who votes for Republicans is aiding and abetting the enemy of the people of the United States.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 18, 2022