Saturday’s shooting in Buffalo, in which an 18-year-old white man killed ten black Americans for no other apparent reason than their race, triggered the usual unseemly and gleeful stampede to capitalize politically, a rush whose fervid atmosphere was accentuated by the bad political environment that Democrats are desperate to escape. Consider what needs to be done in order to profit from this.
The Buffalo shooting fits the classic definition of a hate crime, in which people are targeted for some group characteristic rather than as individuals; for that reason, hate crimes are different from ordinary crime and functionally indistinguishable from terrorism. As I’ve explained before: “Violence and vandalism aimed at strangers for their race, religion or other characteristics don’t just harm the individual victims; they also spread fear to anyone who can see themselves in the shoes of the target. . . . Hate crimes are damaging because they look like hate crimes.” It is not, however, comparable in any sense to terrorism committed by organized, often state-sponsored global networks such as we have seen in the case of radical Islamist violence. Nor is it organized domestic political activity as we have seen with many left-wing mobs or elements of the January Capitol riot. As with many mass shooters, the Buffalo shooter drew his inspiration from a variety of others, but he seems to have acted entirely alone.
In 2017, after a wave of violence against congressional Republicans culminated in a Bernie Sanders supporter attempting a mass assassination of the Republican leadership, I explained my own general standard for this sort of thing: “The blame for violent acts lies with the people who commit them, and with those who explicitly and seriously call for violence. People who just use overheated political rhetoric, or who happen to share the gunman’s opinions, should be nowhere on the list.” The sad reality is that politics and free speech in an open society are bound to generate all sorts of angry nonsense, and some small number of people are apt to turn any particular species of angry nonsense into violence. And not just nonsense: Causes as noble as opposition to slavery have driven some famous bloodshed.
So, how does a political opportunist capitalize? First, it’s necessary to flatten out the shooter’s meandering political inspirations. The Buffalo shooter, as often is true, left behind a 180-page manifesto expressing his racism, white supremacy, and loathing of demographic change. Based on the reported excerpts, however, a lot of it doesn’t fit the narrative. He never mentioned Tucker Carlson, and expressed his hatred for Fox News. He scoffed that “conservatism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it. . . . CONSERVATISM IS DEAD. THANK GOD” He self-described as a “populist,” but one who “falls in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category” and denounced CEOs, capitalism, and global markets. He claims himself as an “eco-fascist” who supports “green nationalism” as “the only true nationalism” and the radical-environmentalist vision of population control: “There is no Green future with never ending population growth.” It would be rather inconvenient to ask if there is a major story in the news right now about methods of limiting the population.
It’s also vital, if you really want to squeeze all the juice out of the opportunity, to give flood-the-zone coverage to the loons that you can turn into exemplars of the other side, while pointedly ignoring others. At best, those can be made into stories about gun laws (never mind that the Buffalo shooter said that he specifically targeted a location with strict gun laws in the hopes that nobody would shoot back). Sunday’s shooting in Orange County, Calif., now appears to have been motivated by Chinese anti-Taiwan sentiment. Not helpful! The 62-year-old black man who injured 29 people with a gun-and-smoke-bomb attack on a Brooklyn subway last month turned out to be a black nationalist with a long track record of racial hatred against white people and intermarriage with white people, who posted racist rants to YouTube for years, and went on an anti-Hispanic tirade just before the attack. Not helpful! So, major media outlets whitewashed the story. Then there was the black driver who plowed his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., in December, killing six people. He, too, had not only a long criminal rap sheet but also a long record of hatred against white people. The Buffalo shooter reportedly considered his crime a retaliation for Waukesha, writing the name of one of the victims on the barrel of his gun. Not helpful! Joe Biden, who is hurrying to visit Buffalo and talk about the attack, begged off going to Waukesha even though it is located in a crucial swing county in a crucial swing state.
One could go on. Ours is a big, unruly country of 334 million people, and there is a lot of room for evil to swim in a sea of that size. Sensational media coverage only exacerbates the problem. But then, there will always be those who see in that coverage only an opportunity.