The Buffalo mass shooter wasn’t a conservative. Indeed, he called himself part of the “authoritarian left.” As journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, the shooter “explicitly describes his contempt for political conservatism. In a section entitled ‘CONSERVATISM IS DEAD, THANK GOD,’ he wrote…‘Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth.’” Moreover, “He heaped praise on an article in the socialist magazine Jacobin…He spoke passionately of the centrality and necessity of environmentalism…He ranted against ‘corporate profits.'” Similarly, he rejected Christianity.
Yet, the media promptly blamed conservatives for the killings. The “Republican Party … helped fuel the ideology that spurred an 18-year-old to travel 200 miles to hunt down Black people,” wrote the Washington Post’s Max Boot. “The 18-year-old White man suspected of gunning down Black people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood was reportedly a believer in ‘replacement theory’ — the notion of a vast conspiracy by Democrats and/or Jews to achieve dominance by “importing” people of color to diminish the political power of White people,” wrote The Post’s Eugene Robinson.
But no Republican Senator or Fox News personality has ever talked about “Jews” importing people of color, the way the Buffalo shooter apparently did.
And it is the woke left — not the right — that most often promotes the idea that America’s white majority will soon disappear due to immigration and demographic change, and that America will soon become a mostly non-white nation, where whites will lose power. Echoing Great Replacement Theory, Beltway progressives gloat that they will soon take over, due to old centrist and conservative whites dying off and being replaced by non-white progressives, amidst what progressives call “explosive population growth of people of color.”
In 2015, Joe Biden praised what he called “An unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop…Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time … we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing.”
Progressives have long trumpeted the idea that this mostly non-white electorate will erode what they see as “white privilege,” causing whites’ relative status to decline and giving non-whites and progressives a solid political majority. The Buffalo shooter, who was left-wing but not progressive on matters of race, may well have come across such rhetoric, and reacted negatively to it, fueling his radicalization (thus leading to the tragic killings in Buffalo).
Above all, progressives are captivated by the idea that the Democratic Party is free to move leftward, and no longer needs to appeal to moderate or conservative voters to win elections, because a “demographic revolution” is creating a “new American majority” in favor of progressive policies, a majority consisting of ever-growing numbers of non-whites, and progressive young professionals. The classic statement of this is the book Brown is the New White: How Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. It exults in the idea that old conservative and centrist white voters are dying off and being replaced by progressives, mostly by non-whites, due to “the explosive population growth of people of color.” The book was heralded by the Center for American Progress, a virtual extension of the Democratic Party described in Time Magazine as “Obama’s idea factory,” and headed by Biden’s senior advisor Neera Tanden. The book was written by a Senior Fellow of that Democratic think-tank, Steve Phillips. The official book release from the Center for American Progress is found at this link.
Progressive-leaning publications like Newsweek have talked about how Democrats are likely to take over once-Republican states, as a result of “migration,” a “growing Hispanic population,” “dwindling numbers of non-Hispanic whites,” and demographic “replacement” of older conservative white voters.
Ironically, the white replacement theory peddled by progressives was faulty, in that non-whites did not vote as heavily in support of Democrats as they predicted, so Democrats did not win the 2016 election, as Steve Phillips and other progressives expected. Even non-white immigrants can find the Democratic Party’s increasing wokeness and left-wing policies very annoying. Polls show that most American voters disapprove of Joe Biden — and that included most Hispanics. The Hill notes that Hispanics are troubled by the Biden administration’s “skyrocketing inflation and crime,” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has privately recognized that her Democratic party has “alienated Asian and Hispanic immigrants with loose talk of socialism,” causing Democrats to lose seats in the House of Representatives in 2020. Immigrants may not be conservative, but they usually are not woke leftists, either.
But these election losses came as a surprise to progressives, who have been peddling their own version of “Great Replacement Theory” for years. Progressive politicians only support unrestricted immigration for political gain, and opposed immigration in the past, even when it was economically and socially beneficial, when it did not give them a partisan advantage.
When immigrants are anti-communist, progressives like Joe Biden want to keep them out. California’s Democratic governor Jerry Brown wanted to close California’s airfields to refugees when Republican President Gerald Ford was using them to evacuate hundreds of thousands of anti-communist Vietnamese refugees from South Vietnam. Brown feared that these anticommunist Vietnamese would vote Republican for a generation — as they in fact did. “Mr. Brown even tried to prevent aircraft filled with refugees from landing at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Among the Democrats who supported Brown were two U.S. senators, Delaware’s Joe Biden and South Dakota’s George McGovern.” During the 1970s and early 1980s, the New Republic’s liberal TRB columnist supported restricting immigration, saying it took America’s focus off helping African-Americans. Back then, Asians voted mostly for Republicans, unlike today.
