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What's Interesting About the Rolling Stone Reporter Who Says Buffalo Shooter Is a 'Mainstream Republican'

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 17, 2022 12:45 PM

All you need to do is read the headline and know it’s liberal hot garbage. I can only imagine newsrooms across America in the aftermath of the heinous shooting in Buffalo. It looks like it was committed by a white nationalist. To the Left, they probably jumped for glee since they can finally report on a mass shooting because it fits their narrative. The past few mass shootings have not fit the bill regarding the ethnicity of the perpetrator. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that further. In short, Rolling Stone wrote that the Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, is a “mainstream Republican,” but there’s something about the author that also sheds light on how this piece is trash. In an unrelated matter, this piece serves as yet another reason for Rolling Stone to just go back to writing about music, movies, and other forms of entertainment. Think of every predictable liberal talking point imaginable—and you’ll get the point of this story (via Rolling Stone):

There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Such was the case on Saturday, when a teenaged white supremacist named Payton Gendron opened fire in a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, while livestreaming the carnage on the live-video site Twitch. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a 180-page manifesto in which he laid out his rationale clearly: He was an adherent of what is called Great Replacement Theory, the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness. It’s a conspiracy theory that has inspired terror attacks in New Zealand and Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso – an ideology that marries demographic panic with the idea of a cunning, nefarious plot. Reading through the document, what struck me hardest, however, was how very close the killer’s ideas were to the American mainstream – the white-hot core of American politics.

[…]

The demographics of the United States are changing, and the share of the population considered white is shrinking. This change is occurring faster than anticipated, thanks to the relative ages of white and nonwhite populations in the country — the nonwhite population trends significantly younger — and all national population growth is being driven by nonwhite groups, according to an analysis by Brookings. This confluence of death, birth, and immigration is in and of itself morally neutral, a matter of the natural ebb and flow of populations over time. But as the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic.

Donald Trump’s ascendance was a key marker of the force of white racial panic; from the moment he launched his candidacy, his overt racism set the party’s agenda, and from the very first, his rhetoric directly provoked racist violence. Far from ebbing as Trump has ceased to be the party’s sole center, however, the tide of white animus has become even more central to a new crop of Congresspeople and candidates.

The Republican Party’s embrace of nativism has been more of a full-on dash than a slow slide, and it has been catalyzed by the vast constellation of right-wing media. Chief among these is the juggernaut that is Fox News.

Okay, that’s all I can muster here. First, Gendron is quite clear in this manifesto that he’s not a conservative. He’s a racist eco-fascist—whatever that means. Yet, that hasn’t stopped the liberal media from trying to paint this guy as a Tucker Carlson acolyte. There is nothing mainstream about this guy. This isn’t modern conservatism. This isn’t even based in reality. And the author not knowing that is not shocking. You might know her. In 2018, she was the fact-checker for The New Yorker until she falsely accused an ICE agent of having a swastika tattoo. There’s no accountability in the liberal media. We all know this which is how these clowns keep getting recycled and finding new places of refuge to spew inaccuracies.