WASHINGTON (AP) — When Joe Biden talks about his decision to run against President Donald Trump in 2020, the story always begins in Charlottesville. He says it was the men with torches shouting bigoted slogans that prompted him to join what he calls the “battle for America’s soul”.
Now Biden faces the latest deadly display of hate after a white supremacist targeted black people with an assault rifle in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and left 10 dead, the deadliest racist attack since he took office.
President and first lady Jill Biden are scheduled to tour the city on Tuesday, where their first stop will be a makeshift memorial outside the supermarket. They are also expected to meet privately with families of the victims, first responders and local officials before the president delivers a public address.
In a speech at a nearby community center, Biden plans to call for tougher gun laws and urge Americans to reject racism and embrace the nation’s diversity, the White House said.
It’s a message Biden has delivered repeatedly since becoming the first president to specifically address white supremacy in an inaugural speech, calling it “the domestic terrorism we must confront.” However, such beliefs remain an entrenched threat at a time when his administration is preoccupied with crises related to the pandemic, inflation and war in Ukraine.
“It is important for him to come forward for the families and the community and to express his condolences,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. “But we are more concerned about preventing this from happening again in the future.”
It’s unclear how Biden will try to do that. Proposals for new gun restrictions have regularly been blocked by Republicans. Moreover, the racism that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, seems to have only spread.
The White House said the president and first lady “will mourn with the community that lost 10 lives in a senseless and horrific mass shooting.” Three other people were injured. Almost all of the victims were black.
Biden was briefed on the shooting by his homeland security adviser, Liz Sherwood-Randall, before attending church services on Saturday near his family home in Wilmington, Delaware, according to the White House. She later called back to tell him that law enforcement had concluded the attack was racially motivated.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, told a Buffalo radio station that she invited Biden to the city.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, it would be so powerful if you came here,” Hochul said. “‘This community is hurting so much, and seeing the President of the United States show them the attention that Buffalo doesn’t always get.'”
On Monday, Biden paid a special tribute to one of the victims, retired police officer Aaron Salter, who worked as a security guard at the store. He said Salter “gave his life trying to save others” by opening fire on the shooter, before being killed himself.
Payton Gendron, 18, was arrested at the supermarket and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty.
Prior to the shooting, Gendron reportedly posted an overflowing screed of racism and anti-Semitism online. The author of the document described himself as a supporter of Dylan Roof, who killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Brenton Tarrant, who targeted mosques in New Zealand in 2019.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Gendron was “someone who has hatred in his heart, soul and mind”, and he called the attack on the store a “hate crime absolute racist”.
So far, investigators are studying Gendron’s connection to what’s called the “great replacement” theory, which baselessly claims that white people are intentionally invaded by other races through immigration or high rates of migration. higher birth rates.
Racist ideology is often mixed with anti-Semitism, with Jews being identified as the culprits. At the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
“A lot of those dark voices still exist today,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday. “And the president is determined as he was at the time. . . to ensure that we fight against these forces of hatred, evil and violence.
In the years following Charlottesville, replacement theory shifted from the online fringe to mainstream right-wing politics. A third of American adults believe there is “a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views,” according to a December poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center. for public affairs research.
Tucker Carlson, the prominent Fox News host, accuses the Democrats of orchestrating mass migration to consolidate their power.
“The country is stolen from American citizens,” he said on August 23, 2021.
He repeated the same theme a month later, saying that “this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of old Americans with more obedient people from distant lands”.
Carlson’s show regularly receives the highest ratings on cable news, and he responded to the furor Monday night by accusing the Liberals of trying to silence their opponents.
“So because a mentally ill teenager murdered foreigners, you can’t be allowed to voice your political beliefs out loud,” he said.
His comment reflects how this conspiratorial view of immigration has spread through the Republican Party ahead of this year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress.
Facebook ads posted last year by Rep. Elise Stefanik, RN.Y.’s campaign committee said Democrats want a “PERMANENT VICTORY INSURGENCY” by granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. The plan would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
Alex DeGrasse, senior adviser to Stefanik’s campaign, said Monday that she “has never taken a racist position or made a racist statement.” He criticized “sickening and false reporting” on his advertisements.
Stefanik is the third House Republican caucus leader, replacing Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who angered the party with her denunciations of Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Cheney, in a tweet on Monday, said the caucus leadership “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends up much worse.
The replacement theory rhetoric has also trickled down to Republican primary campaigns.
“Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal aliens — that’s their campaign strategy,” said Blake Masters, who is running in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona. wrote on Twitter hours after the Buffalo shooting. “Not in my care.”
A Masters spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Jean-Pierre indicated that the White House would speak more broadly about racism than target specific critics.
“Once you start calling people’s names, you get away from that problem,” she said.
Although Biden hasn’t spoken directly about the replacement theory, his warnings about racism remain a staple of his public speeches.
Three days before the Buffalo shooting, at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago, Biden said, “I really think we’re still in the battle for the soul of America.”
Biden said he had no plans to run for president in 2020 — he had failed two previous campaigns, served as vice president, then stepped down as Hillary Clinton solidified support for the 2016 race – and was content to spend time as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
But he said he was disgusted ‘when these people came out of the fields in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying torches’ and repeating the ‘same anti-Semitic bile chanted on the streets everywhere from Nuremberg to Berlin in the early 1930s “.
And he recalled how Trump answered questions about the rally, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, a young woman who was there to protest against white supremacists.
“He said there were really good people on both sides,” Biden said.
He added: “We can’t let this happen, guys.”
Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said the country must “finally chart a course so that we as a nation can begin to fight domestic terrorism as we would foreign terrorism – in the most effective way. possible aggression.
He added: “White supremacy and democracy cannot co-exist.”
Associated Press writer Karen Matthews in New York contributed to this report.
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