Daily Verse | Nehemiah 1:11
“O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.”

Monday’s Reading: Nehemiah 4-7

Monday and a horrific mass murder on Saturday evening in a Buffalo, New York, Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly black neighborhood. The alleged assailant, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, shot 13 people and killed ten of them, including retired Buffalo police officer Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard at the store.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t roundly condemn this atrocity. I unequivocally do.

It seems to have been a premeditated attack, violating the unambiguous sixth commandment: “You shall not murder.” Of course, that admonition no longer has much power in our increasingly godless and violent culture.

The teenager seems to have specifically targeted blacks, allegedly making “it known he was targeting the Black community” after his arrest. He also live-streamed his attack on social media, broadcasting his rampage for the world to see.

Most media outlets immediately attributed the attack to “white supremacy,” “racism,” “terrorism” and “hate crime.”

• ABC News: Suspect fired 50 rounds in Buffalo supermarket hate crime shooting that killed 10: Police
• WIVB4: Buffalo mass shooter’s alleged manifesto leaves no doubt attack was white supremacist terrorism
• USA Today: Buffalo attack highlights most lethal domestic threat: Racist, extremist violence
• NBC News: 10 killed, 3 wounded in racist shooting at Buffalo supermarket, officials say
• CNN: Mass shooting at Buffalo supermarket was a racist hate crime, police say
• NBC News: The Buffalo supermarket shooting suspect allegedly posted an apparent manifesto repeatedly citing ‘great replacement’ theory

It seems clear that the young man did, in fact, target a demographically black neighborhood. He allegedly arrived the day prior and “conducted reconnaissance on the area and store the day before the shooting.” During his rampage he reportedly pointed his gun at a white person, then said “sorry” and didn’t shoot. So, even though he shot two white people, it seems almost certain that his targets were intentionally blacks.

This is deeply disturbing, of course, but not just because it was racially motivated. It’s deeply disturbing because it occurs in an era when the FBI and the DOJ have claimed, without presenting any specific evidence, that “domestic terrorism” is the greatest threat to the homeland. In an article titled “Far-right terror poses bigger threat to US than Islamist extremism post-9/11,” The Guardian US newspaper wrote,

Earlier this year an intelligence report 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, and the White House published a strategy for countering the problem.

The FBI director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that the 6 January insurrection wasn’t an isolated event and “the problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a number of years”.

Wray added that white supremacists comprise “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio overall” and “have been responsible for the most lethal attacks over the last decade”.

Director Wray said that white supremacists and “racially motivated extremists” posed the greatest threat to the U.S. Now we have a white male who seems to have deliberately targeted a black community and indiscriminately killed ten people and wounded three others.

It would seem that the DOJ and the FBI now have a prime example of what they have warned about.

The problem, however, is that in a 180-page “manifesto” attributed to Gendron, he doesn’t identify himself as a “far-right” supremacist, as the title and the body of The Guardian article talk about (along with other publications, such as NPR’s “Wray Stresses Role Of Right-Wing Extremism In Hearing About Jan. 6 Riot“). Instead, Gendron describes himself like this:

“When I was 12 I was deep into communist ideology, talk to anyone from my old high school and ask about me and you will hear that. From age 15 to 18 however, I consistently moved farther to the right. On the political compass I fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category, and I would prefer to be called a populist.”

[…]

Later in the manifest, the shooter insists, “I would prefer to call myself a populist. But you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.” He also repeatedly attacks capitalists, and rejected the conservative label because, he wrote, “conservativism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it.”

If this is indeed the shooter’s manifesto, it’s hardly the writing of a “far-right extremist.” But the Left has a narrative to prop up and the mainstream media are all Democrats with bylines.

Without downplaying the white supremacist angle or the devastation Gendron visited on 13 people and their loved ones, this is hardly a slam dunk for what seems to be an all-out effort ahead of the November midterms to demonize not just the “far-right” but the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, about whom Brandon, extending his hand in unity, said, “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in recent American history.”

I don’t think it’s a stretch to predict that what happened in Buffalo this past weekend will continue to be spoken of as “white supremacy” and “racially motivated hate crime” (which it certainly seems like it was) but without the detail that Gendron described himself as being on the Left. In other words, the media will use the words that most Americans associate with the far-right but conveniently ignore that those words, at least in this case, actually describe someone on the Left.