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The Shameless Media Effort to Hold Republicans Responsible for the Buffalo Shooting

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Police officers secure the scene after a shooting at TOPS supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., May 14, 2022. (Jeffrey T. Barnes/Reuters)

A Rolling Stone article made the case that the man who killed ten people in a Buffalo supermarket is simply a ‘mainstream Republican.’

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dive into the Democratic narrative on the Buffalo shooting, wonder just how much lower CNN can sink, and hit more media misses.

Dems, Media Blame GOP, Conservative Media for Buffalo Shooting

A tragedy unfolded in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket over the weekend when an armed 18-year-old white man named Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire in a grocery store in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. The shooting left ten people dead and three others wounded.

While Gendron has been charged with first-degree murder — to which he pleaded not guilty — the FBI is investigating the incident as a hate crime and a case of racially motivated violent extremism.

Yet the liberal media would have readers and viewers believe that the GOP armed the alleged shooter and primed him to commit the crime.

Rolling Stone came right out and suggested in a headline that “the Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.”

The article, which is authored by Talia Lavin, who was fired from her role as a fact-checker for the New Yorker after falsely accusing an ICE agent of having a Nazi tattoo, argues that there is “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,” Lavin writes.

She goes on to argue: “While Gendron’s choice to engage in mass slaughter puts him on the radical fringe of those who enforce their beliefs with bullets, and his overt antisemitism differs slightly from vaguer blame of ‘elites,’ ‘Democrats’ and ‘globalists,’ his fixation on white birthrates and demographic change are neither fringe nor particularly unusual.”

“The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic,” she writes. “What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.”

Juliette Kayyem of the Atlantic also suggested the Buffalo shooter was not a “lone wolf,” saying “he was supported by an apparatus that provided the ideology and means for the hunt.”

The Washington Post published a series of articles about the “great replacement theory” and how it played into the shooter’s views. The theory says that non-white people are being brought to the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters to further a political agenda.

Yet as NR’s Charles C.W. Cooke noted last year, numbers from the 2020 election show that a person’s race does not necessarily determine how that person will vote. Cooke adds that commentary about how race fits in with political views is deemed more acceptable when it comes from the mouths of Democrats.

One Post article suggested that “conservative media is familiar with Buffalo suspect’s alleged ‘[great replacement]theory.’”

“The suspect in Saturday’s killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket allegedly wrote a document endorsing ‘great replacement theory,’ a once-fringe racist idea that became a popular refrain among media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News and conservative writer Ann Coulter,” the article says. It does also note that Gendron’s alleged 180-page manifesto indicates he was radicalized online, and that “there’s no indication that he watched Carlson’s program.”

Gendron’s alleged manifesto said he was “radicalized” on the Internet during the beginning of the pandemic, according to the New York Post. He said he was influenced by “infographics, sh**posts and memes”

For all of the blame members of the media have placed on the GOP, the Buffalo attacker described his views as being “mild-moderate authoritarian left,” “eco-fascist national socialist,” and “populist.”

Yet many suggested Fox News and Carlson were to blame for radicalizing Gendron.

https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1525582416596844546

https://twitter.com/matthewjdowd/status/1525603588927545344?s=20&t=M_uhgUd1mAGfJUOmawAAoQ

Some, ignorantly determined to equate white supremacy with conservatism and studiously ignoring the GOP’s gains among Hispanics, blacks, and Asians in the last presidential election, blamed the GOP.

Others drew completely false comparisons between the shooter and Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on all charges in connection with his shooting of three men, two of them fatally, all of whom were white. Rittenhouse was, furthermore, found to have acted in self-defense.

CNN’s Not-So-New Direction

Chris Licht, who took the CNN helm from Jeff Zucker, has been heralded as the breath of fresh air the cable news network so desperately needs. Unlike Zucker, it has been supposed that the new boss would bring a focus on reporting to the outlet; think less Brian Stelter, and more Clarissa Ward.

It’s a narrative Licht has sought to feed. In a memo to staff leaked on his first day at the helm earlier this month, Licht lamented that “too many people have lost trust in the news media,” and wrote that he’d seek to regain news consumers’ trust by “fearlessly speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo, questioning group-think, and educating viewers and readers with straightforward facts and insightful commentary.” 

“First and foremost, we should, and we will be advocates for the truth,” declared Licht.

Stelter’s been given free reign to continue with his embarrassing, and increasingly desperate stunts, in this instance providing a platform for and validating the claims of Steve Schmidt without any additional reporting to back them. Schmidt, a failed interviewee to be Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, is known to have lied about his supposed ignorance of his fellow Lincoln Project principal John Weaver’s sexual predations while both were still with the PAC. When the allegations against Weaver went public, Schmidt professed to be “angry because I know the damage that he caused to me,” but also “enormously proud of the Lincoln Project.”

More recently, Schmidt has gone through a very public breakdown that’s playing out on Twitter, one that’s seen him relentlessly attack Megan McCain – the daughter of John McCain, whom he tried to elect president – and McCain himself. While in a recent Substack post, Schmidt alleges that McCain carried out an affair with a lobbyist, and overlooked the relationships with Russia of members of his 2008 presidential campaign, Schmidt had long traded on the McCain name, using his past association with the senator and war hero to assert moral authority. Less than a year ago, he said a monologue from Megan McCain’s husband, Ben Domenech, amounted to a “weapons grade rejection” of his father-in-law’s legacy.

Stelter is using Schmidt not to advocate for the truth, but because he suspects his audience might have a taste for the smearing of dead Republicans.

Living ones, too, get this treatment at Licht’s CNN, where earlier this month a reporter fretted that conservative appointees on the Supreme Court may soon end the right to interracial marriage in the United States. Such level-headed reporting earned a push notification, as did another article worrying about the “lack of transparency” at the “secretive” Supreme Court.

Nothing about Chris Licht’s background – he’s coming off a stint as Stephen Colbert’s executive producer –  suggests that he’s interested in, or knows anything about, respectable reporting. Nothing about his performance to date suggests that he’s capable of running a respectable news-gathering organization. 

CNN’s new direction is the same as its old one: The arrow is always pointing down.

Headline Fail of the Week

Politico reports that “Biden Starts Conceding that the Bygone Era of D.C. May, Indeed, Be Gone.” 

That’s a bit like reporting that a serial arsonist has admitted to having seen a bit of smoke in his day, no? Biden delivered a speech just a couple of months into his presidency calling an anodyne Republican bill extending early voting in the state of Georgia “Jim Crow on steroids,” and compared every elected official in the country not supporting his expansive election-reform bill – which got rid of voter I.D., among other controversial provisions – to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis.

Media Misses

-The New York Times published an opinion piece titled, “Pregnant? Need Help? They Have an Agenda.” The column attacks crisis pregnancy centers, writing that the “anti-abortion movement” uses the centers to take advantage of women’s “economic vulnerability.” 

NR’s Alexandra DeSanctis said it best:

-Meanwhile, Catholics for Choice argued that as abortion has come to the forefront of the public conversation once again, too many tweets and headlines “ignore trans folks.”

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