Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Police and FBI agents have a suspect in custody in Saturday's terrorist attack at a grocery store Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, New York.  An avowed, radicalized white supremacist terrorist shot and killed at least 10 people in a Tops, a Black neighborhood grocery store, in a heavily-armed execution-style rampage by an 18-year-old white male.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said the supermarket shooting suspect was wearing tactical gear and livestreaming as he entered the store.

"At approximately 2:30 today, an individual who the mayor stated is not from this area and is from hours away, drove to Buffalo and went to ... the Tops market. He exited his vehicle, he was very heavily armed. He had tactical gear. He had a tactical helmet on. He had a camera that he was livestreaming what he was doing,"

The suspect is an 18-year-old White male, he said.

He shot four people in the parking lot, Gramaglia said, three of whom died.

The suspect went inside the store, where a security guard and former Buffalo police officer engaged him.

"Because he had heavily armored plating on, the bullet had no round. The suspect engaged our retired officer and he was shot and deceased at the scene. He continued to work his way through the store," Gramaglia said.

He made his way back to the front of the store, where patrol officers were able to talk him into dropping his gun after he "put the gun to his own neck."

Police arrested the suspect and transported him to Buffalo Police Headquarters.

 

The FBI is treating this as a hate crime.

Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Buffalo Field Office, said the FBI is assisting in the investigation as well during a news conference.

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting "pure evil" during the news conference.

"It was straight-up, racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, outside of the city of good neighbors as the mayor said, coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us," Garcia said.

Out of the 13 victims, 11 are Black while two are White, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.

 

A heavily-armed white supremacist terrorist in tactical gear went to this store to kill Black people and did. And when he did it, he streamed it live on Twitch.

Officials said the gunman broadcast the attack live on Twitch, the live-streaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers. Twitch said it had taken the channel offline. The channel’s page said only that it was “currently unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s community guidelines or terms of service.” In a statement, a Twitch spokeswoman said the site “has a zero-tolerance policy against violence of any kind and works swiftly to respond to all incidents. The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content.”

And he had a racist, anti-Semitic manifesto ready to go after he did the deed. Repotedly, the manifesto is 100% "Great Replacement" theory bigotry, he specifically "chose" this Tops supermarket in order to kill as many Black people as he could, to stop them from "replacing" white Americans.

You know, Tucker Carlson's favorite subject.

The Fox News host has repeatedly fear-mongered about Democrats allegedly bringing in dark-skinned immigrants with the express purpose of “replacing” the American (read: white) electorate. On Wednesday night, he declared that the Biden administration is intentionally trying “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration.

“In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries,” Carlson exclaimed. “They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it's happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”

The so-called “Great Replacement” theory is a white-supremacist belief in a conspiracy among liberals and wealthy elites to demographically and culturally replace the white population of majority-white countries with immigrants of non-European descent. In recent years, the theory has served as the inspiration for racist mass killings in El Paso, Pittsburgh and Christchurch, New Zealand.

Yet, despite its overtly racist and antisemitic roots, the conspiracy theory—thanks in large part to Carlson’s embrace of it—has become more acceptable and normalized within the Republican Party, with numerous GOP lawmakers and officials openly citing it.

On Thursday, in response to Carlson’s latest segment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt renewed his calls for Fox News to dump its biggest star.

“It cannot be overstated enough,” Greenblatt said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “For Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most-watched news programs in the country, to use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.”

Greenblatt added: “If it somehow wasn’t clear enough before to the executives at Fox News that Carlson was openly embracing white nationalist talking points, let last night’s episode be case and point. We reiterate our call to Fox News and Lachlan Murdoch: Tucker Carlson must go.”

 

That was April 2021 and again in September.

And guess what? The Great Replacement theory is accepted by half of Republican voters.  

 

Last December, the Associated Press and NORC conducted a large national poll examining conspiratorial ideas including this one. 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.

The AP-NORC poll included several other questions related to the idea. They asked whether respondents were concerned about native-born Americans losing economic, political and cultural influence as the number of immigrants increased and whether they were concerned that the system under which elections are conducted discriminates against White Americans.

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.

The pollsters also asked respondents what cable news channel they preferred. As might be expected, those who preferred Fox News were more likely than Americans overall or than those who preferred CNN or MSNBC to agree with the replacement theory idea. Three in 10 of those who prefer Fox News held the agree/concerned positions on the first two questions above. Among those who watched cable news closer to the right-wing fringe — One America News and Newsmax — the figure was 45 percent.

 

We know exactly where the terrorist in Saturday's attack was radicalized. I've been saying for years now that this was going to breed more deadly violence and today, it did.  It's racism openly supported and repeated by several sitting GOP members of Congress and 2022 candidates.

And today ,at least ten people died directly because of it.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Socially Awkward Laws

A shadow docket move late Wednesday means the 5th Circuit has sided with the Texas GOP allowing the state's anti-social media moderation law to take full effect while the law is being reviewed by the courts, meaning Texas citizens can now sue social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for any comment, content, or blocking moderation to the tune of billions.

A federal appeals court will let Texas enforce its new social media law — which targets Twitter, Facebook and other large platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives — even though the court has yet to rule on the law's constitutionality.

The one-sentence order by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, issued Wednesday evening, came with no explanation and was split 2-1, though the order did not indicate how the panel's three judges voted.

The law known as House Bill 20, approved largely along party lines by the Legislature last year, was blocked from taking effect in December by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of Austin.

Siding with two tech industry groups that challenged the law, Pitman said HB 20 was an unconstitutional violation of social media companies' free speech rights — interfering with the platforms' editorial discretion and their First Amendment right to moderate the third-party content they disseminate.

"HB 20 prohibits virtually all content moderation, the very tool that social media platforms employ to make their platforms safe, useful, and enjoyable for users," Pitman wrote.

Wednesday's order came only two days after the appeals court heard oral arguments in which Texas lawyers defended HB 20 as a legitimate effort to ban platforms from censoring certain viewpoints.

Texas argues that the large platforms are "common carrier" public forums, subjecting them to state regulation to ensure free and unobstructed access without fear of viewpoint discrimination.

Ken Paxton, the state's Republican attorney general, called the ruling a "big win against Big Tech."

"Texas's HB 20 is back in effect," Paxton wrote on Twitter. "The 5th Circuit made the right call here, and I look forward to continuing to defend the constitutionality of HB 20."

The Texas law lets users sue if they are blocked from posting on a large platform or if their posts are removed.

Tech industry groups argued that HB 20 would open social media platforms to countless lawsuits, upending their ability to enforce content moderation policies and protect users from abusive posts, scams or falsehoods.

Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, which challenged the Texas law, said the industry group plans to immediately appeal the order, which he called "an unusual and unfortunate move" because it was issued without explanation or addressing the law's merits.

 

The countless lawsuits and inability to protect users from abuse, disinformation, and harassment is the entire point, and as of right now, expect any efforts to moderate the worst, most racist, most misogynist, most antisemitic content on social media to end immediately.

And if this is upheld by SCOTUS, and there's no reason to think otherwise, expect the end of social media as we know it.

Trump's Truth Social and white supremacist hotbeds like Gab and Parler will be the only games in town very soon.