US shooter embraced racist ‘replacement’ theory online

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WASHINGTON: The teenager charged with shooting dead 10 African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York followed an insidious racist creed gaining ground among white Americans that minorities are taking over society.

The 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron took explicit inspiration from the white supremacist gunman who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

The Christchurch killer had warned in a manifesto of a “Great Replacement” of white Christians of European descent by blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos and others, a theory that has found an increasing echo in American right-wing politics and on cable news.

Lifting often word-for-word from the rambling text, Gendron produced a chilling 180-page manifesto of his own – in which he stated his goal: to “kill as many blacks as possible”.

Gendron himself came from a rural town in New York state that had a very small number of non-white residents.

He learned his hate almost exclusively online, a pattern of “radicalization” that law enforcement authorities say has only increased in recent years to become a major threat to the United States.

Gendron drove 320 kilometers to the Tops market in Buffalo to carry out his attack in a neighborhood he knew had a large African American population, during the busiest shopping period of the week.

ALL-WHITE TOWN

The 18-year-old murder suspect is the son of two New York state engineers, Paul and Pamela Gendron.

They live in a modest two-story home, with a large, well-manicured lawn, down a quiet rural lane in Conklin, New York.

Nested on the winding Susquehanna River and surrounded by forests and small farms, Conklin has a handful of trucking and distribution centers, and the headquarters for an electronics company.

Its population of 5,000, according to the 2020 census, was 96 per cent white and just 0.6 per cent African-American.

Gendron finished high school in June 2021 after a rough 18 months of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, when students were often isolated in their homes with classes online and personal interactions more than ever confined to social media.

The New York Times quoted classmates saying he was generally quiet, even “reclusive,” and preferred courses online even when in-person classes resumed.

He had an interest in guns common among rural US teens. But by his final year authorities had received a warning about him.

Law enforcement officials said that last year, before graduating, Gendron said his plans for the future were undertaking a murder-suicide.

He was given a psychiatric assessment, and claimed he had been joking. Released after a few days, his case was apparently then forgotten until the massacre on Saturday.

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