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In Wyoming, Likely End of Cheney Dynasty Will Close a Political Era (VIDEO)

Stick a fork in her. She's done.

At the New York Times, "If Representative Liz Cheney loses her primary on Tuesday, as is widely expected, the Cowboy State’s conservative tilt will take on a harder edge":

CODY, Wyo. — At an event last month honoring the 14,000 Japanese Americans who were once held at the Heart Mountain internment camp near here, Representative Liz Cheney was overcome with emotions, and a prolonged standing ovation wasn’t the only reason.

Her appearance — with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as former Senator Alan Simpson and the children of Norman Mineta, a Democratic congressman turned transportation secretary who was sent to the camp when he was 10 — was part of a groundbreaking for the new Mineta-Simpson Institute. Ms. Cheney was moved, she said, by the presence of the survivors and by their enduring commitment to the country that imprisoned them during World War II.

There was something else, though, that got to the congresswoman during the bipartisan ceremony with party elders she was raised to revere. “It was just a whole combination of emotion,” she recalled in a recent interview.

As Ms. Cheney faces a near-certain defeat on Tuesday in her House primary, it is the likely end of the Cheneys’ two-generation dynasty in Wyoming as well as the passing of a less tribal and more clubby and substance-oriented brand of politics.

“We were a very powerful delegation, and we worked with the other side, that was key, because you couldn’t function if you didn’t,” recalled Mr. Simpson, now 90, fresh off being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and as tart-tongued as ever about his ancestral party. “My dad was senator and a governor, and if I ran again today as a Republican I’d get my ass beat — it’s not about heritage.”

He was elected to the Senate in 1978, the same year that Mr. Cheney won Wyoming’s at-large House seat, and they worked closely together, two Republicans battling on behalf of the country’s least populated state in an era when Democrats always controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

It’s not mere clout, however, that traditional Wyoming Republicans are pining for as they consider their gilded past and ponder the state’s less certain political and economic future. Before Tuesday’s election, which is likely to propel Harriet Hageman, who is backed by former President Donald J. Trump, to the House, the nostalgia in the state is running deeper than the Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Simpson were not only in the leadership of their respective chambers in the 1980s; they, along with Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Yale-educated cold warrior whose grandfather served in both the British House of Lords and the Wyoming Legislature, got along well and often appeared together as a delegation in a sort of road show across the sprawling state (“A small town with long streets,” as the Wyoming saying goes).

Even headier was the administration of President George Bush. Mr. Cheney became defense secretary, and his wife, Lynne, served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, while Mr. Simpson was both the second-ranking Senate Republican and one of the president’s closest friends. On top of that, the secretary of state at the time, James A. Baker III, spent summers on his Wyoming ranch, meaning two of the country’s top national security officials could be found doing unofficial promotional work for the state’s tourism industry.

“You’d have Army choppers snatching Cheney and Baker from fishing holes,” recalled Rob Wallace, who was Mr. Wallop’s chief of staff.

As conservative as the state was on the national level — Lyndon B. Johnson is the only Democrat to carry Wyoming in the past 70 years — the Wyoming Republican delegation worked effectively with two well-regarded Democratic governors in that same period, Ed Herschler and Mike Sullivan.

Now, Ms. Cheney hardly even speaks to the two other Wyomingites in Congress — Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, both Republicans — and has little contact with Gov. Mark Gordon. Ms. Lummis has endorsed Ms. Hageman. But Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon, who are mainline Republicans in the Cheney tradition, have sought to maintain neutrality in hopes of avoiding Mr. Trump’s wrath.

“They’ve got to make their own choices and live with the choices that they make,” Ms. Cheney said about the two men, before adding: “There are too many people who think that somebody else will fix the problem, that we can stay on the sidelines and Trump will fade.”

Asked about the Cheney legacy in Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon both declined to comment...

 

Second Amendment: Supreme Court Blocks New York Law Limiting Guns in Public

This is the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, a case in my mind whose outcome was never in doubt. The Court's 6-3 conservative majority is shifting the direction of constitutional law back to the "original intent" doctrine favored earlier by big names such as former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Anton Scalia. It's very exciting. Leftists are losing their minds on Twitter. 

The decision strikes down New York's requirement that those seeking a permit to carry a gun in public must show "proper cause," meaning an individual must show a special need to carry a firearm, distinct from that of the general public's. That requirement is now swept away in what's being said is a dramatic expansion of Second Amendment rights in constitutional law. 

Here's SCOTUS Blog on the decision, "In 6-3 ruling, court strikes down New York’s concealed-carry law":

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a New York handgun-licensing law that required New Yorkers who want to carry a handgun in public to show a special need to defend themselves.

The 6-3 ruling, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is the court’s first significant decision on gun rights in over a decade. In a far-reaching ruling, the court made clear that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right “to keep and bear arms” protects a broad right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense. Going forward, Thomas explained, courts should uphold gun restrictions only if there is a tradition of such regulation in U.S. history.

Thursday’s landmark decision came less than six weeks after a gunman killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, and less than a month after 21 people – 19 children and two teachers – were shot to death at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. In response to those shootings, the Senate this week reached an agreement on bipartisan gun-safety legislation that, if passed, would be the first federal gun-control legislation in nearly 30 years. The 80-page bill would (among other things) require tougher background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21 and provide more funding for mental-health resources.

The state law at the heart of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen required anyone who wants to carry a concealed handgun outside the home to show “proper cause” for the license. New York courts interpreted that phrase to require applicants to show more than a general desire to protect themselves or their property. Instead, applicants must demonstrate a special need for self-defense – for example, a pattern of physical threats. Several other states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, impose similar restrictions, as do many cities.

The lower courts upheld the New York law against a challenge from two men whose applications for concealed-carry licenses were denied. But on Thursday, the Supreme Court tossed out the law in an ideologically divided 63-page opinion.

The court rejected a two-part test that many lower courts have used to review challenges to gun-control measures. That test looked first at whether a restriction regulates conduct protected by the original scope of the Second Amendment and then, if so, whether the restriction is fine-tuned to advance a significant public interest. Instead, Thomas wrote, if “the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct,” the government has the burden to show that the regulation is consistent with the historical understanding of the Second Amendment.

Applying that new and more stringent standard to the New York proper-cause requirement, Thomas found that the challengers’ desire to carry a handgun in public for self-defense fell squarely within the conduct protected by the Second Amendment. The amendment’s text does not distinguish between gun rights in the home and gun rights in public places, Thomas observed. Indeed, he suggested, the Second Amendment’s reference to the right to “bear” arms most naturally refers to the right to carry a gun outside the home.

After reviewing nearly seven centuries’ worth of historical sources, beginning in the 1200s and going through the early 1900s, Thomas concluded that although U.S. history has at times placed some “well-defined restrictions” on the right to carry firearms in public, there was no tradition of a broad prohibition on carrying commonly used guns in public for self-defense. And with rare exceptions, Thomas added, there was no historical requirement that law-abiding citizens show the kind of special need for self-defense required by the New York law to carry a gun in public. Indeed, Thomas concluded, there is “no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

Thomas rebuffed New York’s effort to justify its proper-cause requirement as an effort to regulate guns in “sensitive places” – specifically, crowded urban areas, like Manhattan, where people are likely to gather. Thomas agreed that, as a historical matter, there have long been laws restricting guns in places like courthouses and polling places. Moreover, he continued, restrictions that apply to the modern versions of “sensitive places” may also pass constitutional muster. Although Thomas left open exactly what might qualify as a “sensitive place,” he made clear that urban areas do not meet that definition. The state’s “argument would in effect exempt cities from the Second Amendment and would eviscerate the general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense,” Thomas concluded...

Still more.

 

The Moral Idiocy of Gun Control

It's Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "Is it more moral to own a gun or to pay someone else to do it for you?":

I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada.

“There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head.

We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month.

Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers.

Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous.

The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns.

The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was "puzzled". “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, and they want to get a gun on Staten Island,” he argued. “That’s not rational, but some people really want guns.”

Perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer muggings in Staten Island is that more of the folks there can prevent them. Muggers, like most predators, prefer victims who don’t fight back.

Big city progressives find guns indefinably ‘icky’. It’s not only foreigners who marvel at a country where guns, even ‘big scary black ones’, are available everywhere. The propaganda of Michael Moore’s “Bowling in Columbine” and countless network news shows is that people who live surrounded by guns have created the conditions for mass shootings. And they have it coming.

But New Yorkers, like most big city dwellers, live surrounded by guns. These aren’t the guns that ride on trucks or sit in sporting goods store displays. They’re the guns flashed by a mugger under his heavy down winter coat, or shot by rival gang members exchanging fire in the 73rd precinct in Brooklyn which accounted for around 100 shootings in just one year alone.

And there are the guns worn more openly by the army of police officers, security guards, bodyguards, and others, many of whom live on Staten Island, who are hired to keep New Yorkers safe. Two years ago, Bond, an app that some have called 'Uber for Bodyguards' debuted, allowing New Yorkers to order their own security personnel. New Yorkers, who disdain guns, instead tap an app for bodyguards to escort them from their train stop to their office.

Most urbanites hate living in this kind of world, but they hate the alternative even more.

Gun control isn’t policy, it’s culture. And while the media often goes on about “gun culture”, there’s little thought given to “gun control culture” for the same reason that fish rarely film documentaries on what it’s like to have gills and swim underwater.

Gun control culture means paying men with guns between $50,000 to $85,000 a year in the hopes that they’ll show up in under 10 minutes and do something useful when you call 911.

That strategy didn’t work very well in Uvalde. It doesn’t work all that well most of the time.

Before Uvalde, in the recent Buffalo mass shooting, a 911 operator hung up on a store employee calling for help. The cops arrived in 5 minutes: in time to talk the shooter out of killing himself in front of the store so that taxpayers can pay for his trial and a 50-year prison term.

And that’s what a fantastic response time looks like. But by then, 10 people were dead.

Gun control culture pathologically hates guns, but also hates the men it hires to wield them. Urban lefties threw an anti-police tantrum that was so successful that their cities are frantically trying to hire more police officers to keep up with the resulting crime wave on their streets.

Police defunding is deader than the thousands of additional murder victims in the Year of BLM.

Gun control is a fantasy that somehow making guns as illegal in the rest of the country as they are in New York will put a stop to all the violence so that urban and suburban elites won’t have to choose between being victims or paying the armed men they disapprove of to protect them.

Eliminating guns isn’t actually on the table.

This is a choice between an empowered public of gun owners and an endless running battle between cops and thugs in a society where only criminals and governments have guns.

A nationwide New York or Chicago.

Most Americans don’t want to live in this kind of world. Neither does anyone else. That’s why the wealthy hipsters who poured into New York City after Giuliani cleaned it up are leaving. Those who can afford it, go to the suburbs or to wealthy enclaves in other parts of the city. While crime hasn’t entirely depopulated the city, it has put a stop to gentrification. A slow motion white flight is happening all over again even though its participants are too ashamed to admit it.

The sharp division between gun culture and gun control culture is the border of an affected distancing from life’s realities. Gun controllers aren’t necessarily physical cowards, but they are moral cowards.

The same sorts of people who think guns are ‘icky’ also don’t want to know where their meat comes from or to see the soldiers who come back from the wars. These are things that they pay other people to do because it preserves their illusions about the world and about themselves.

America is becoming a nation split between those hard workers who take responsibility for dealing with life’s realities and the managerial elites who only issue meaningless orders.

Faced with shootings, managerial elites apply rule-based abstractions to messy realities that they are incapable of grappling with. The Left is always good for easy solutions that take away agency from individuals and invest it in a central authority in order to solve the unsolvable problems of human nature. And the managerial elites are always suckers for the myth that getting everyone to follow the rules in line with some grand theory will solve everything.

The people who, as the champion of managerial elites, once claimed, “cling bitterly” to their guns, understand that life is messy and that there’s no grand fix, only a series of choices.

Gun ownership is an act of personal responsibility. By buying and owning a firearm, a man is saying that he also intends to take ownership of his personal safety and his choices. That doesn’t always end happily, but there’s far more moral self-awareness in that choice than there is in urban elites who hate guns paying the gun owners they despise to keep them safe.

The one thing we absolutely own in this world are our choices.

Gun control isn’t about stopping gun violence, but disavowing moral responsibility for preventing it, passing the buck to the cops, to society, and to some force outside our control. Gun control rallies are the virtue signaling of moral cowards seeking to blame someone else for horrors that they cannot cope with and that they do not intend to take any personal action to prevent.

Disarmament, national or personal, is not a moral stance, but the abandonment of morality.

Gun controllers have had a field day with the inaction of the Uvalde cops, but it never occurs to them that’s who they are, standing around, wringing their hands and waiting for someone to tell them what the plan is, so they don’t have to make any difficult choices in the face of a crisis.

Gun control is the moral idiocy of the irresponsible blaming those who have taken responsibility.

 

Democrats' Gun Control Agenda Not About Protecting Children

Here's the expert, Dana Loesch, "It's Not About Protecting Kids, It's About Banning Guns: Their response is to render you incapable of protecting them, took":

The Biden administration contradicted two separate commissions comprised of educators and security experts and reiterated that they have no intention of improving school security to protect students...

The Uvalde killer accessed the school through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School. There was no outside force multiplier against unlawful entry, no known security system, and no SRO on campus.

The commissions recommended numerous security measures, including controlled ingress/egress, locking doors, SROs, and more. Democrats oppose improving security and instead stated that they were also focusing on basic 9mm handguns while again falsely proclaiming that people were disallowed cannon ownership during the Revolution. He made this remark to the press pool yesterday. Last week Senator Chuck Schumer tanked a school safety proposal instead choosing to advance only gun control measures.

Authorities admitted during Friday’s presser with Texas DPS that they were hesitant to enter the school for fear they’d be shot.

Meanwhile, more details about the Uvalde killer’s violent behavior are spilling into public. The killer tortured animals. He was known to cops, he drove around randomly shooting people with a bb gun and tried to fight random people in the park. He threatened online women with rape and murder. He stopped coming for work and dropped out of school. Through his job at Wendy’s he was able to save $4k for two rifles and ammunition (should we also boycott Wendy’s?). No one in his family seemed engaged enough to see the obvious troubling signs. No one said anything, just like in Buffalo. Just like in Parkland.

TWO REASONS WHY AGE RESTRICTIONS AND UBCs FAIL

The Uvalde killer had murderous intent. As his violent behavior escalated, are we really to believe that a proposal like an age increase would have removed his murderous intent? The killer in Las Vegas’s 2017 tragedy was 64 years-old. The Virginia Tech killer was 23 years old. Where is the guarantee that the Uvalde killer would simply wait — instead of going to the black market where the majority of criminals get their guns?

Our respondents (adult offenders living in Chicago or nearby) obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft. *Only about 60% of guns in the possession of respondents were obtained by purchase or trade. Other common arrangements include sharing guns and holding guns for others.

Gangs continue to play some role in Chicago in organizing gun buys and in distributing guns to members as needed.

More: Washington Post: Four out of five criminals obtain their guns illegally

More: Chicago Tribune: Survey: Crooks get guns from pals, don’t keep them long

70 percent said they got their guns from family, fellow gang members or through other social connections. Only two said they bought a gun at a store.

A study from the DOJ — Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016:

About 1.3% of prisoners obtained a gun from a retail source and used it during their offense.

Handguns were the most common type of firearm possessed by state and federal prisoners (18% each); 11% of all prisoners used a handgun.

Among prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense, 90% did not obtain it from a retail source.

More from DOJ: Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms — the vast majority of felons obtain their weapons on the black market.

“ASSAULT WEAPONS” BANS

Are we to believe that a ban on a commonly-owned rifle responsible for the fewest number of homicides (even when compared to hands feet and fists?) would work? ...

Yet still Democrats propose another “Assault Weapons” ban when the first one didn’t work.

RAND:

We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.

Propublica: “The senator says ‘the evidence is clear: the ban worked.’ Except there's no evidence it saved lives – and the researcher behind the key statistic Feinstein cites says it's an outdated figure that was based on a false assumption.”

LA Times: No, the assault weapons ban didn’t work: Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994

The New York Times: “The Assault Weapon Myth”

School shootings are, thankfully, rare tragedies. Defensive gun use — when guns are used to protect and save lives — outnumbers criminal usage even by the most conservative estimates.

GUN-FREE ZONES

Schools have been gun-free zones since the 1990 passage of the Gun Free School Zones Act. The video of parents howling after they were blocked from going and saving their children is gutting. I read one mom broke free and hopped the fence to get into the school, totally unarmed, with nothing but her fierce nature as a mother to protect.

The people allowed to have the guns stood outside. If the government is going to demand a gun free zone anywhere they need to guarantee the safety of the people being disarmed — if at a school they should protect those kids with the same ferocity as that desperate mother and have the ability to do it — especially considering police have no legal obligation to protect your life...

Keep reading. 

Less Gun Control Likely in Wake of Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre

Gun owners will tell their communities are safer, with less crime, when everyday people are armed and ready to defend their lives and the lives of others. Taking away the basic right to bear arms only empowers  criminals, who flout whatever regulations are in place or those coming down the pike.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court may make it easier for individuals to carry arms in public spaces, which if it turns out that way, will have a very significant effect on California.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. gun laws are getting looser, not stronger, despite more mass shootings":

In recent weeks, a string of devastating shootings — at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., a church in Laguna Woods, and now an elementary school in little Uvalde, Texas — has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions.

Just hours after a teenage gunman killed at least 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school Tuesday, an emotional President Biden demanded: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a series of furious tweets Tuesday, asked, “Who the hell are we if we cannot keep our kids safe. This is preventable. Our inaction is a choice. We need nationwide, comprehensive, commonsense gun safety now.”

Experts, however, say the opposite — the loosening of gun laws — is almost certainly coming instead.

That’s despite the 10 shoppers and grocery workers gunned down in a largely Black neighborhood on May 14. The elderly Taiwanese churchgoers terrorized a day later. The elementary school students shot dead Tuesday at Robb Elementary School.

“If your reaction to these kind of atrocities is, ‘Well, where is the political will to move the needle on regulation?’ the truth is that the space for that kind of regulatory move is becoming narrower and narrower, both as a matter of constitutional law but also as a matter of state law,” said Darrell A.H. Miller, a Duke law professor and expert on the 2nd Amendment and other gun laws.

By this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision undoing a long-standing New York law that forbids individuals from carrying guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.

Depending on how narrowly the court tailors its decision, the ruling could have sweeping implications for similar concealed carry restrictions all across the country and especially in liberal states like California, Miller and other 2nd Amendment scholars said.

If the court issues a broad decision — such as one that implies regulations on guns that aren’t historically based are unconstitutional — even more gun control legislation could become vulnerable to challenges, the scholars said.

“Any day now the Supreme Court could hand down its decision in the New York concealed carry case and make it much harder for states like California to regulate guns in the name of public safety,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor.

Miller said the “trend line is definitely [toward] ever more expansive gun rights,” not gun restrictions, and that there will almost certainly be “a flurry of litigation” from gun rights advocates targeting additional state gun control measures once the Supreme Court issues its decision in the New York case.

Pro-gun rights groups have been slowly building toward such an outcome for years, scholars said, and feel that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — bolstered by former President Trump’s three appointees — shares their interests in scaling back gun restrictions nationwide. At the same time, Miller said, many lawmakers in red states feel emboldened to bolster gun rights now — even in the face of tragedies such as what happened in Uvalde, where a teacher, at least one other adult and 19 elementary school children were killed by a gun-wielding 18-year-old who was later shot to death by a Border Patrol agent.

Before the school massacre, the black-clad gunman allegedly shot and wounded his grandmother.

“Even absent action by the Supreme Court of the United States, the demonstrated reaction of red states in particular to atrocities like what just occurred in Texas and what just occurred in Buffalo — what was it, last week? — is not to actually reconsider or even consider any sort of gun regulations, but ever more expansive gun rights,” Miller said.

Miller was one of several law professors who filed what’s known as an amicus brief with the high court in the New York case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen, in which they argued against a far-reaching decision suggesting that any gun regulation not grounded in early U.S. history is unconstitutional...

 

Victims in Texas Shooting Were Killed in One Classroom

Following-up, "'We do have background checks --- laws are already in place...' (VIDEO)."

God have mercy.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas School Shooting Victims Were Killed in One Classroom":

Officials say shooter barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

All the victims killed in the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school Tuesday were in the same classroom, a law-enforcement official said, as details about both the victims and how the massacre unfolded continued to emerge.

According to law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation, the gunman barricaded himself in a two-room classroom and fired on law enforcement continually through the windows of the classroom.

The details of the attack were continuing to unfold a day after 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year.

All of the victims have been identified, Lt. Christopher Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN Wednesday.

Police have identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde, pronounced you-VAL-dee, is a city of around 16,000 located about 80 miles west of San Antonio. The school teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

Members of an elite Border Patrol tactical team known as Bortac responded to the shooting but couldn’t get into the classroom because of a steel door and cinder block construction, according to the officials familiar with the investigation. Meanwhile, the gunman shot at them through the door and walls.

Bortac members were able to enter the room after getting a master key from the principal, according to the officials. One Bortac agent took rounds to their shield upon entering, a second was wounded by shrapnel. A third killed the suspect.

Inside, authorities found dead children in multiple piles, according to the officials.

Agents from Bortac, among the most highly trained federal agents, typically track smugglers, serve high-risk warrants and raid stash houses.

Before the massacre at Robb Elementary, Ramos shot his grandmother, who he lived with, before going to the elementary school, according to police. Mr. Olivarez said the shooter’s grandmother is still alive, and that police are working to understand the motive behind the massacre.

“Everything is still active,” Mr. Olivarez said. “We’re trying to put all the pieces together.”

A law-enforcement official said Ramos legally purchased two assault-style rifles on the same day, within a week of his 18th birthday, from the same local store. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires firearms dealers in border states such as Texas to report the purchase of two or more semiautomatic rifles within five days as part of a program that aims to spot gun trafficking across the Mexican border.

Former and current law-enforcement officials said that buying two rifles on the same day or during the same week wouldn’t necessarily trigger further inquiry. An ATF official declined to say whether Ramos’s purchase was flagged to the agency. Officials said they believe Ramos acted alone and aren’t pursuing other suspects, according to Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the local school district. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has determined that there is no known connection to terrorism, a law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation said.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S.

President Biden addressed the shooting Tuesday night from the White House not long after returning from a five-day trip to Asia.

“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away,” he said in a seven-minute speech from the Roosevelt Room.

As he has before, including in Buffalo earlier this month after the mass shooting there, the Democratic president called for gun-control legislation.

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said. “I am sick and tired of it. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday...

 

18 Children and 1 Teacher Killed in Texas Schoohouse Massacre (VIDEO)

I've been watching this unfold this afternoon. The death toll keeps going up. We're in Sandy Hook territory at this point, and it's devastating. 

At the video, Chris Murphy, far-left Senator from Connecticut, goes off, "What are we doing here?!!" 

He always goes off. Then, nothing changes, because the left can't get over its gun control fetish when state authorities need the power to intervene before people get killed, and that means institutionalizing those with a history of mental illness and a documented propensity toward gun violence. Elliot Rodger, who killed 7 in the 2014 U.C. Santa Barbara attacks, should have been hospitalized beforehand. He'd been under long-term treatment and his parents knew he was not right in the head. 

Mass murderer James Holmes had been under the care of a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. He killed 12 and 70 others survived their wounds. I wrote a lot about it at the time. See, "Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Can Be Isolating, Competitive, and Highly Demanding," and the links therein.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas Shooter Kills at Least 18 Children and One Teacher in Elementary School":

An 18-year old man opened fire in a Texas elementary school Tuesday, killing at least 18 students and one teacher before he was killed by police, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Police identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde is about 80 miles west of San Antonio.

Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, shot his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary School, police said. He left his vehicle outside the elementary school in Uvalde and carried a handgun inside, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Two police officers who responded to the scene were shot, but are expected to survive, the governor said.

“What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas,” said Mr. Abbott, a Republican.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting, the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed, was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S. That record stood for a little more than a week.

The Uvalde school district reported an active shooter at Robb Elementary School just after 11:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. The school, according to the district’s website, teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

All district and campus activities, after-school programs and other events were canceled. The district said parents could pick up students at regular dismissal times at their respective campuses, and officers would be there to escort the students to their parents’ vehicles.

“Parents please be patient as lines will be long,” the school district said in a post on social media.

After the shooting, Uvalde Memorial Hospital said 13 children arrived by ambulance or buses for treatment and two people arrived deceased.

University Health, in San Antonio, said it had received two patients from the shooting, a child and an adult. The hospital said the adult was a 66-year-old woman in critical condition. Hospital authorities didn’t confirm whether the woman was the shooter’s grandmother.

he child, identified as a 10-year-old girl, was also in critical condition.

Late Tuesday, authorities were in the process of notifying victims’ families, said Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s chief of police.

Armando Ramos, an uncle of Salvador Ramos, said in an interview that he doesn’t think his nephew intended to target the school, but wound up there after a police chase. Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whose name he declined to share, is currently in surgery, he said.

President Biden was briefed on the shooting as he flew back to Washington from a trip to Asia and planned to give remarks Tuesday night, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

“His prayers are with the families impacted by this awful event,” she tweeted.

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday.

Gov. Abbott said he had instructed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to investigate the shooting...

 

Democrats Mobilize Demonization

Well, er, speaking of the devil. I just wrote about this a minute ago, "Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil":

And now here's Caroline Glick, "Demonization, American Style":

Demonization, the effort to portray a political rival as an inhuman monster, has long been a means to mobilize public support. The ancient Romans did it. The Soviets didn’t know there was another option.

While negative campaigning has long been a tried and true method for winning elections in the free world, actual demonization was fairly rare, particularly in the United States, actual demonization was a fairly rare phenomenon until after the turn of the century. But in recent decades, and with unprecedented intensity and venom since 2016, the Democrats have aped the Soviets and adopted demonization as their main political tool for winning elections. The primary object of their hatred is former President Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi showed how it is done in an interview with CNN. The interview focused on the Democrat Party’s concern that the conservative majority in the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the federal mandate for abortions and letting the separate states decide for themselves whether to place limitations on the procedure. Concerns among Democrats and the party’s progressive base rose exponentially earlier this month when in a shocking break with the past, a source at the Supreme Court leaked a draft judgment on the issue authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito to Politico.

Sunday, CNN‘s Dana Bash asked Pelosi if the fact that conservatives are now the majority on the Supreme Court means that the Democrats dropped the ball on abortion rights. Pelosi rejected Bash’s assertion and instead blamed Trump.

Brimming with rage Pelosi seethed, “Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far-right, and appointing those anti-just freedom justices to the court?”

In that one sentence, Pelosi managed to demonize Trump, demonize Trump voters and delegitimize three sitting justices of the Supreme Court. It bears noting that as Pelosi made these remarks, Democrat activists were staging threatening demonstrations outside the homes of conservative justices.

Pelosi’s statement wasn’t an isolated event. It was part of an overall partisan strategy ahead of the Congressional elections in November. President Joe Biden gave voice to it in a speech last Friday where he spoke of “Ultra MAGA Republicans.” Just to make clear what he was talking about, he called Trump “King MAGA.” MAGA, or Make America Great Again, was of course Trump’s election slogan in 2016. Since then, MAGA has become shorthand for Trump supporters.

The obvious purpose of Biden’s coinage of “Ultra MAGA” was to link all Republicans to Trump and to make the 2022 elections a referendum on Trump, the demonic “creature” even though Trump isn’t on the ballot and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.

The administration is so excited by the new term their invented that Biden’s spokeswoman bragged that “Ultra MAGA” was the product of six months of market research.

Wednesday, Politico reported that the progressive fundraising giant Moveon.org is launching a $30 million “Us vs. MAGA” ad campaign ahead of November. Moveon.org executive director Rahna Epting told the progressive online publication that the purpose of the campaign is to tie Republicans to Trump, who all right-thinking people hate because he threatens the very existence of America.

The idea of using demonization as a political tool was most powerfully introduced to radical US politics by political guru Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals became the political bible for revolutionary leftists in the Democrat Party. There Alinsky warned his disciples that in light of the unpopularity of their America-hating agenda, the way to win is by distracting the public from their actual agenda and to focus their target audience instead of on their political opponents, whom they would defeat by presenting him as the devil.

One of Alinsky’s star pupils was a young coed at Wellesley College named Hillary Rodham, better known by her married name Hillary Clinton. Alinsky’s methods were adopted and taught in the 1990s by a community organizer in Chicago named Barack Obama.

As the US moves into elections mode, the last thing the Democrats want to talk about is policy. The only issue they may want to run on is abortion, and it’s unclear how popular the issue will be in swing states and districts. The more the US public feels the impacts of the Democrats’ economic, energy, and social policies, the lower the party’s polling numbers drop. Every day another shocking story appears about the fruits of the Democrats’ revolutionary agenda.

This week, for instance, the school board in Kiel, Wisconsin, a small town of some 3,000 people decided to charge three middle school boys with sexual harassment.

Their crime?

They didn’t refer to a girl in their class as “they” or “them” after she said she decided she is no longer willing to be referred to as “her” or “she,” because she no longer considers herself a female.

According to Critical Race Theory expert Christopher Rufo, depending on the questions asked, between 60-80% of Americans oppose revolutionary sexual policies. The more stories appear like the one from Kiel, Wisconsin, or even more distressing ones about children given sexual hormones by school officials without their parents’ knowledge or consent, the more voters abandon the Democrat Party in fear.

The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their agenda isn’t to move toward the public by ending their support for sex-change operations for minors. They remain stridently committed to their agenda. The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their policies is to castigate the Republicans as the evil acolytes of Trump who share his demonic characteristics – first and foremost, “racism.”

Last weekend, an 18-year-old racist antisemite murdered 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Biden, Democrat politicians from coast to coast, the progressive media, and Hollywood stars all rushed to blame Trump, Fox News, and the entire Republican Party for the slaughter. Never mind that the same day, a Chinese man motivated by hatred of Taiwanese entered a church attended by Taiwanese immigrants in California and opened fire killing one and wounding four other worshippers. Last December, a black racist mowed down six people, and wounded 77 more, (all white) at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Republicans didn’t blame Biden and the Democrats.

Tuesday, Democrat advertising executive Donny Deutsch explained the Democrats’ post-Buffalo massacre efforts on MSNBC. In Deutsch’s words, the Democrats’ mission post-Buffalo is to, “Brand every Republican,” as the party of “racist, violent replacement theory.”

“Take a branding iron, put it on them so any mainstream Republican has to wear that badge.” Notably, the Democrats’ “Ultra-MAGA campaign hasn’t raised any concern among Republicans. Indeed, immediately after Biden launched it, the Republican National Committee began printing “Ultra MAGA” t-shirts to give away to party donors.

Some 95% of Republicans voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Despite its near-unanimous support, the Democrats’ demonization of the former president did have an impact at the margins of the party and among independent voters. Members of these groups were convinced that Trump and the Republicans are a demonic force that threatens the soul of America.

It wasn’t the likes of Deutsch who convinced them. That job was carried out by a smattering of former Republicans who share the Democrats’ visceral hatred of Trump. In the 2018 Congressional elections, and to an even greater degree in the 2020 presidential race, members of this tiny minority of Republicans appeared nearly around the clock on progressive media organs to castigate Trump and his voters as dangerous, racist and evil. While their overall impact was indiscernible, in all-important swing states where Biden’s margins of victory were miniscule, they appear to have made a difference.

Today the same group of former Republicans is working full throttle at the side of the Democrats to prevent their former party from winning the mid-term elections and taking control of Congress.

Sitting at Deutsch’s side on the MSNBC panel Tuesday was political activist and former Republican Miles Taylor. While serving as a mid-level official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Taylor anonymously published an op-ed in the New York Times and a book where he claimed that many officials inside the administration believed that Trump was a danger to the United States. These officials, he said, were working together to subvert Trump’s policies and save America from its duly elected president. Now Taylor is running a well-funded Super-PAC, where “former Republicans” run campaign ads against Republicans.

Taylor explained that the goal is to shame Republicans into leaving the party.

“I tried and failed to save the party in my own little way,” he said.

“We tried to prevent Trump from rising in 2016. Some of us tried from within to contain his reckless impulses. We thought we beat him in 2020, but we didn’t. Trumpism is alive and it’s well and it’s fueling this so that what conservatives need to do is convince other conservatives to quit the Republican Party.”

It’s hard to know what these former Republican conservatives tell themselves when they see empty shelves in supermarkets, $4.00/ gallon gas, cratering stock markets, and boys being persecuted for being boys in schools across America. It’s hard to know what they tell themselves when they see children indoctrinated to reject their biological sex and hate their parents and their country.

But what is clear enough is that through their efforts to demonize their fellow conservatives, former party and former president, these Trump-hating former Republicans enable the progressive revolution. Under the mask of anti-Trump paranoia, this revolution rejects the foundations of the United States and seeks to transform the country from the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of the unfree, and home of the bullied, cowed and socially engineered.

 

The Sinister Symmetry of CRT and GRT

From Andrew Sullivan today, on Substack, "The extremes of right and left on immigration are fueling each other":

The MSM rushed last weekend to explain the previously obscure conspiracy theory that motivated a mass-murderer on a shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. We didn’t get to read the warped “manifesto” of the mass shooter, but we were told about its account of “Great Replacement Theory.” It posits that a shadowy, global elite (in this case — surprise! — Jewish) is deliberately fostering mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The goal is a minority-majority country in which the Republican Party is doomed by inexorable racial demographics, and a whole new multiracial society can be built on the smoldering ruins of “white supremacy.”

“Wait a minute!” as Homer Simpson might say. Haven’t I heard some of that kind of talk before? It’s coming back to me now. Here’s one devotee: “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Here’s another: “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.” And another: “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing.”

These quotes are from then-VP Joe Biden, Univision founder Jorge Ramos, and sassy Dem Party hack James Carville celebrating the implosion of white America. This was also the theory that drove the 2016 Clinton campaign to ignore white swing voters and focus instead on the non-white: “What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” was how the genius Robby Mook put it, before he helped elect Trump.

No, these people do not represent a secret conspiracy — let alone a Jewish one — to dilute the “whiteness” of America. There is nothing secret about it at all. The majority-minority enthusiasts represent instead a transparent movement to see Americans primarily in racial/generational terms, to view a multi-racial society as a zero-sum endeavor in which a gain for whites always means a loss for non-whites, and who therefore cheer the declining percentage of Americans who are deemed “white.”

Whole libraries could be constructed by the books outlining this thesis. It really got started with John Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (2002), Sid Blumenthal’s “The Strange Death of Republican America” (2008), Carville’s “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” (2009), Ron Brownstein’s Next America project (2012), Paul Taylor’s “The Next America” (2014), and William Frey’s “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America” (2014), to cite a few. All of them argue that mass immigration is a critical factor in making America majority non-white and therefore Democratic. And all of them are pretty much psyched.

When I say “psyched,” there is a spectrum. Here’s Michelle Goldberg not so long ago: “Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority” — and she “felt good” about that non-white future. Here’s Jen Rubin, reacting to the news last year that the Census found numbers of white people falling: “This is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” And who can forget Michael Moore’s reaction to the same news “Best day ever in U.S. history.”

None of them seemed concerned that the thesis could boomerang on them. By “boomerang,” I mean racializing politics so aggressively that you actually help create and legitimize a racially white party — because of negative partisanship. In the words of Michael Barone: “When you keep telling white Americans that they will soon become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’ — then many non-college graduate ‘deplorables’ may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively.” Exactly.

And when this demographic prediction is combined with constant denigration of “white people,” and when a simple white majority is suddenly redefined as “white supremacy” — indistinguishable from the era of Jim Crow — then feelings might get, shall we say, “triggered.” If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: “so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.”

As for the GRT notion that demographic transformation was somehow imposed on America by cunning elites, there’s no real evidence for that. The key moment — the Immigration Act of 1965, which made non-white immigration a priority — was not deemed demographically revolutionary at the time. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified: “This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America.” Senator Edward Kennedy pledged:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

His brother, Bobby, told the House subcommittee his prediction of Asian immigration under the bill: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle, it would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear … we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.” Emanuel Celler, House sponsor of the bill, insisted: “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European.”

And yet by 1998, Patrick Reddy, a Democratic consultant, boasted that the act had “resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.” And by 2018, 78 percent of immigrants were non-European, and Europeans made up a mere 9.8 percent of new green-card holders in 2020. As for Bobby Kennedy’s prediction of 5,000 immigrants from Asia, the number now is 14 million. Not a plot. Just a massive predictive error.

Mass illegal immigration has also lent legitimacy to gripes about rapid demographic change against the majority will. You could argue that the 1965 Act was a democratic process; but you can’t really say that about subsequent illegal immigration. The GOP liked the cheap labor; the Democrats believed that it would eventually help them win elections. That wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a kind of anti-democratic mutual understanding — and you can’t blame someone for thinking it felt like one. Voters repeatedly voted for border control, but even Trump failed...

If we are to get past the kind of ugly violence and race essentialism in Great Replacement Theory, then we also need an antidote to the toxins of Critical Race Theory. The two illiberalisms are profoundly connected. They need each other. And, in their racialized heart, they are morally exactly the same.

 

Buffalo and the Myth of Racist America

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "Democrats want to create another George Floyd moment."

Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)

She had a killer interview with Harris Faukner on Fox this morning. She's spunky and fired up. I love her message. Last night's primaries were a disaster for the Democrats, and she's expecting the GOP to sweep into power and start shutting down the left's radical agenda next January.

It's no wonder Democrats are now trying to destroy her, alleging her campaign spots have invoked the dreaded "great replacement theory."

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leaders Face Calls to Denounce White Supremacy, ‘Replacement’ Theory":

Stefanik rejects any tie between party rhetoric and racist violence as Cheney criticizes Republican leadership.

WASHINGTON—Some GOP lawmakers are calling for Republican Party leaders to forcefully denounce white supremacy, after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., sparked renewed focus on political rhetoric related to race and immigration.

Eleven of the people shot at the supermarket were Black, and two were white. In documents posted online that police think the alleged shooter wrote and compiled, he cited racist conspiracy theories he discovered on Internet message boards. At several points, he condemns both Democrats and Republicans as being controlled by a Jewish conspiracy.

In the documents, the writer presents racist and anti-Semitic views and references the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory centered on the notion that whites are being systematically replaced with other racial groups and immigrants. Police said he targeted the grocery store because of its location in a Black neighborhood. In one document, he attacks immigration as “ethnic replacement.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, in which 10 people were killed, Democrats and some Republicans who are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and his political movement called for other GOP lawmakers to condemn white supremacist rhetoric. Mr. Trump rose to prominence during his first presidential campaign in part by deploying harsh language about illegal immigrants that his critics said often was dehumanizing and racist.

After a woman was killed at a 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump wavered on condemning the marchers, at one point saying there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who was kicked out of the Republican House leadership last year after sharply criticizing Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, said House GOP leaders have enabled white nationalism and anti-Semitism and must renounce those views within the party. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Ms. Cheney tweeted.

Back in February, she said party leaders should have been tougher on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) for speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) tweeted that the “replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed.” Mr. Kinzinger, who isn’t running for reelection, said Republicans need to oust Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, along with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

“We’ve never supported white supremacy,” Mr. McCarthy said Monday night. “The suspect is the very worst of humanity and for political individuals to try to make some political game out of this shows how little they are.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said, “It is truly disgusting to use an evil act of mass murder by a mentally ill individual against your political opponents. But nothing is beneath the Democrat Party. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican Whip, said Republicans have been very vocal against white nationalism. He also referenced the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice that left him badly wounded, saying he knew from experience that the aftermath of a tragedy is a time for prayers, not ratcheting up the rhetoric and blame.

Ms. Stefanik, in a statement, said she was “heartbroken and saddened to hear the tragic news of the horrific loss of life” in Buffalo. Her camp rejected the idea that being tough on illegal immigration amounted to promoting white supremacy or racism.

Stefanik senior adviser Alex deGrasse said any attempt to tie the shooting to Ms. Stefanik “is a new disgusting low for the left, their Never Trump allies” and the media. “Ms. Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

The comments came after scrutiny of her past campaign ads. The Washington Post reported that Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee paid for Facebook ads last year that said Democrats were seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by giving millions illegal immigrants citizenship in an attempt to bolster their election chances...

 

Tucker Carlson on the Buffalo Massacre (VIDEO)

My previous Buffalo coverage is here.

Payton Gendron's Descent Into Racial Extremism (VIDEO)

I did not read the guy's manifesto. 

When Norway's Anders Breivik murdered 77 people back in 2011, I read his manifesto, which was easily available online. Lots of anti-jihad bloggers were cited at the document, although Breivik wasn't easily pinned down as a white supremacist. Frankly, he could have been the William Foster of Oslo, murdering scores of people while having a bad day in an urban multicultural dystopia. 

I looked for Gendron's statement, to no avail. Folks on the left think they've got this guy nailed down like he's James Earl Ray or something. Who know? He's a kid who knew he'd be throwing his life away if he went through with his plans. What a fucking waste.

At WSJ, "Buffalo Shooter’s 673-Page Diary Reveals Descent Into Racist Extremism":

A lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, found inspiration online: ‘I just don’t have the time to wait any longer’."

CONKLIN, N.Y.—Days before carrying out one of the deadliest racially motivated attacks in recent U.S. history, Payton Gendron wrote that he’d finally made up his mind.

“I just don’t have the time to wait any longer,” he posted online. “I was supposed to do this 2 months ago. But now I finally feel actually ready.”

The entry was from a nearly 700-page online diary that Mr. Gendron, an 18-year-old white man, kept for the past several months. Writing under the online pseudonym “Jimboboiii,” he detailed his preparations for the massacre and his embrace of racist conspiracy theories that he said drove him to kill. A link to the diary was posted on a public web forum shortly before Mr. Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo last Saturday.

The attack left 10 people dead and three more wounded. All but two of his 13 victims were Black. They included an 86-year-old grandmother, a retired Buffalo police lieutenant and a church deacon.

Mr. Gendron, who is being held without bail after surrendering to police, pleaded not guilty to a single charge of first degree murder. Federal prosecutors said they are contemplating charging him with hate crimes. Mr. Gendron’s diary entries, which appear to date from November 2021 to the night before the shooting, along with an accompanying 180-page document, chronicle his descent into a shadowy, isolated world of swirling conspiracies, paranoia and violence.

Investigators are working to fill in missing pieces of Mr. Gendron’s background. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and police continue to pore over evidence from Conklin to Buffalo.

But Mr. Gendron’s extensive posts—a dark and paranoid monologue—present a portrait of a mass shooter that has become familiar in recent years: a lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, who finds inspiration to commit mass violence in the recesses of the Internet.

Mr. Gendron seemed to live an unremarkable childhood. He played soccer as a youth, was a Boy Scout and made his high school’s honor roll. He planned on going to college to become an engineer.

In the months leading up to the massacre, Mr. Gendron spent hours glued to a computer in his family’s home in this quiet, predominantly white town in upstate New York. He posted dozens of hateful memes about Black people and Jews, discussed past racially motivated mass shootings and planned his own attack in painstaking detail. In March, he drove hundreds of miles to scout the Buffalo supermarket he later attacked.

He disdained mainstream political parties and the media, writing that he believed they were controlled by Jews. He described himself as a fascist.

Though there were harbingers of trouble—including a 2021 incident in which he was hospitalized after threatening violence at school—Mr. Gendron by his own account had seemed to keep his plotting and extreme views largely hidden.

His tone flippant in some entries and rageful in others, Mr. Gendron posted his plans to a private channel on the messaging platform Discord. A few people had access to view the content, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“We took action against the server as soon as we became aware of it and removed all related content and the server in accordance with our policies against violent extremism,” said a spokeswoman for Discord.

Mr. Gendron found his way to extreme online forums on the anonymous social platform 4chan when he felt bored during the pandemic, he wrote. He started on pages devoted to the outdoors, migrated to ones focused on guns and ultimately landed on a page that allows nearly unfettered discussion of white supremacy. 4chan didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

In Mr. Gendron’s Discord entries, which started last November, he recounted his childhood in this town of 5,000, saying he didn’t have many friends, wasn’t close to his family and felt isolated.

“I would like to say I had quite a normal childhood ([less-than] 8) but that is not the case,” he wrote, signifying his life up to 18.

Mr. Gendron is the oldest of three boys, according to neighbors. His parents, Paul and Pamela, are civil engineers who work for the New York State Department of Transportation, an agency spokesman said.

The boys played basketball in their driveway, and had a trampoline in the backyard, neighbors said. Mrs. Gendron would walk around the neighborhood for exercise, and Mr. Gendron would wave while tending to his property. By the front door there is a round cement tile bearing a boy’s hand print, a heart, the year 2008 and the name Payton.

The parents didn’t answer phone calls seeking comment and weren’t at their home when a reporter visited Monday. One of Mr. Gendron’s lawyers, Daniel Dubois, declined to comment on Tuesday. In one diary entry, dated May 5 of this year, Mr. Gendron wrote that he competed on school swimming and soccer teams and, until Covid-19, volunteered as a firefighter. But he said over and over that he never fit in. In a separate entry, dated May 9, he wrote that serving as a youth leader in his Boy Scout troop was “the peak of my life,” but “everything went bad after.”

“It’s not that I actually dislike other people, it’s just that they make me feel so uncomfortable I’ve probably spent actual years of my life just being online,” he wrote in the May 5 entry. “And to be honest I regret it. I didn’t go to friend’s houses often or go to any parties or whatever. Every day after school I would just go home and play games and watch youtube, mostly by my self [sic].”

While neighbors and those who interacted with him said Mr. Gendron seemed quiet and responsible, his behavior grew erratic in recent years. On the first day of his senior year at Susquehanna Valley High School in 2020, he came to school wearing what appeared to be a full-body medical protective suit complete with gloves and gas mask. In his online journal, Mr. Gendron posted a photo of himself in class wearing the outfit. Later, he posted memes calling Covid a Jewish conspiracy.

He credited 4chan, where extremist views are expressed with few restrictions, with influencing him. In particular, he spent time on the platform’s “politically incorrect” page that is known among analysts as a hub for spreading far-right ideology, including white supremacy.

“I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior,” he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.

Last spring, a teacher reported to school administrators that Mr. Gendron had written about wanting to carry out a shooting, a law-enforcement official said. The state police were called, and he was taken to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation before being released a day and a half later, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.

Mr. Gramaglia said state and federal law enforcement didn’t detect any further warning signs involving Mr. Gendron until Saturday’s shooting.

“I spent 20 hours in a hospital’s emergency room on 5/28/2021,” Mr. Gendron wrote, in a post dated Dec. 9. “This was because I answered murder/suicide to the question ‘what do you want to do when you retire?’ on an online assignment in my Economics class.”

Mr. Gendron wrote in his Discord logs that his time in the hospital was “one of my worst nights of my life” and called it a turning point.

“I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” he wrote. “That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns. It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

In a public letter, Superintendent Roland Doig said the local school district was “shocked and unspeakably saddened by the tragic, racially motivated hate crime that took place in Buffalo, New York on Saturday.” Mr. Doig said the district is cooperating with law enforcement and wouldn’t comment further.

By the time he was hospitalized, Mr. Gendron had already discovered racist theories online, and his hospital stay pushed him further toward action, he wrote.

He exhaustively discussed in his diary the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white racist belief espoused by previous mass shooters and promoted on extremist online forums. It claims Jewish conspirators use Black people, immigrants and others to undermine whites. He also cited as a key motivation the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 51 dead. That lone gunman, who promoted the replacement theory, had live-streamed his attack on Facebook.

The Gendrons didn’t show outward signs of trouble at home, erecting a tent and inviting neighbors and friends to a party last June when Payton Gendron graduated from school. Neighbors recalled Mr. Gendron saying he would follow in his parents’ footsteps to become a civil engineer.

A photo posted on his high school’s Flickr account shows Mr. Gendron and another individual driving in a black Toyota convertible festooned with balloons and a banner adorned with his name in a senior class parade. After graduating, he briefly attended SUNY Broome community college during the fall semester of 2021 and spring semester this year, according to the school.

Mr. Gendron also worked for about four months this winter at the Conklin Reliable Market along the town’s main road, but left around three months ago, according to store owner John Gage.

“He was a real quiet kid,” Mr. Gage said. “Gave me two weeks’ notice when he left. Never had any problems with him.”

During this period, Mr. Gendron ruminated on Discord over his evolving plans for the coming attack. He wrote about browsing extreme corners of 4chan and Reddit every day. By early February, he wrote that he was skipping his college physics class to work on documents he planned to publish about his beliefs...

 

Renaud Camus' 'Le Grand Replacement'

Following-up from yesterday, "Great Replacement Theory."

The New York Times is very interested in this, as noted last night on Twitter.

Here's the newspaper's story from 2019, which bears a lot of similarity with its reporting yesterday on the Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron (perhaps for political purposes). See, "The Man Behind a Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy":

Here it is: 🫤 #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #BuffaloNewYork #BuffaloStrong #PaytonGendron https://t.co/7qs6KKH5f2

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022

PLIEUX, France — Though the writer had already lived in his castle for a quarter of a century, it was only three years ago that he finally restored it to its original purpose as a fortress.

The writer, Renaud Camus, rebuilt the top 10 feet of the 14th-century tower, giving him an even more commanding view of his surroundings: the village of 40 souls below; the Pyrenees, faintly visible some 100 miles south despite the midsummer haze; and, in every direction, the peaceful, rolling hills of the “eternal France” that he describes as under assault from what he calls hordes of immigrants.

Up in his castle, the France that Mr. Camus imagines has made him one of the most influential thinkers on the far right in his own country and elsewhere. In his writings, he describes an ongoing “invasion” of France by immigrants bent on “conquest” of its white, European population. To him, the immigrants are “colonizing” France by giving birth to more children and making its cities, towns — and even villages — unlivable.

Others have espoused similar ideas. But Mr. Camus’s portrayal of demographic change — le “grand remplacement,” or the supposed “great replacement” of France’s original population by newer arrivals, mostly from Africa — has become an extremist talking point, cited by mass killers in distant parts of the world.

“It’s a slogan that dramatizes the situation, talking of great replacement the same way we speak of the great barbarian invasions,” said Rudy Reichstadt, an expert on political extremism at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute in Paris. “Now, if you go to a horse race betting bar and talk politics, and you mention the great replacement, people will understand what you mean.”

The idea of the great replacement has directly influenced French politicians and thinkers. Interpreted and repackaged across the internet, it has resonated widely beyond France, including in white supremacist circles.

The men held in two recent mass shootings — at a Walmart in El Paso and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand — both referred to the “great replacement” and the need to defend white populations against invading outsiders.

While decrying the killings, Mr. Camus said he had no regrets about coming up with the term.

“The great replacement has become a household word,” he said. “I take responsibility for it. I believe in its relevance.”

Stroking his white beard, Mr. Camus, who is not related to the 20th-century writer Albert Camus, sat in his expansive study — half the top floor of his castle filled with books and a handful of African masks. In contrast to the harsh words he chooses to describe France’s immigrants, he spoke softly, and sometimes with the mannerisms of another era. He and his partner of two decades, Pierre, addressed each other as “vous,” though they said they sometimes slipped into the informal “tu.”

Ensconced in his castle in southern France, in a village an hour’s drive across country roads from the nearest train station, Mr. Camus, 73, is perhaps an unlikely source of inspiration for the world’s far right and white supremacists. Until a few years ago, Mr. Camus was known, mainly by other French writers, as a novelist and a pioneering writer of gay literature. An early book about his sexual experiences, called “Tricks,” remains his most translated work.

Growing up in a conservative rural town in central France, Mr. Camus went to Paris in the 1960s and found a niche in the capital’s literary and artistic scene. He befriended Roland Barthes, who wrote the preface for “Tricks.” As a member of the Socialist Party, he became active in politics on the left.

Still, Mr. Camus longed to return to the countryside. He sold his Paris apartment and, in 1992, used the money to buy and restore the castle in Plieux, fulfilling a lifelong fantasy.

A few years after moving to Plieux, he had what he calls an epiphan that would shape his political views. While visiting a 1,000-year-old village in southern France, he said he saw a group of veiled women milling around a fountain.

“And in the ancient windows — beautiful, paired gothic windows — veiled women would appear all of a sudden,” he said. “It was really the population of eternal France that was changing.”

That led to the formation in 2002 of his own political party, l’In-nocence, which calls for an end to all immigration and promotes sending immigrants and their children back to their countries of origin.

But it was a decade later, when he publicly began using the term “great replacement” and wrote a book with the same title, that his influence in France began to be felt.

The great replacement, he wrote, indicates the “replacement of a people, the indigenous French people, by one or others; of its culture by the loss of its cultural identity through multiculturalism.”

He says he sees no contradiction between his earlier life as a gay writer on the left and his current role as an ideological beacon for the right, including violent extremists. He contends he has always told “the hard truths.”

Previous generations of European immigrants had been drawn by “love” for France, he wrote. But the newer arrivals since the 1970s — mostly from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb and in sub-Saharan Africa — didn’t come “as friends.” Instead, he declared, they came as conquerors and colonizers, filled with hatred and a desire to punish France. He singled out Muslims for “not wanting to integrate” into French society...

 

Buffalo Suspect Peyton Gundron, White Supremacist Spouting 'Great Replacement Theory', Is 'Mainstream Republican'

Rolling Stone's headline, at Memeorandum  "The Buffalo Shooter Isn't a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He's a Mainstream Republican." 

Talking to my wife yesterday, the first thing I said is "Democrat will use this to tar all conservatives as white supremacists." 

Sure, there's going to be a political angle to these things, but it was barely a few minutes after the news breaking that Democrats began viciously smearing conservatives and Republicans is literally accomplices to murder, as mentioned Saturday. I've been out here 15 years blogging, and grave-dancing as soon as a conservative or Republican dies is the most consistently heinous fact about Democrat leftists. It's evil.

I tweeted yesterday:

This isn’t journalism. It’s a smear, hateful #Democrat Party propaganda. #Democrats #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #PeytonGenfron #RepEliseStefanik #Election2022 https://t.co/b9FdvOwXen

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022

And at the New York Times, also piling on Rep. Stefanik, "A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P." (via Memorandum)":

Replacement theory, espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators.

Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.

The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.

And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”

Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.

But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.

By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.

No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than the Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did.

“It’s not a pipeline. It’s an open sewer,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired in 2020 after defending the network’s decision to call Arizona for then-candidate Joseph R. Biden, and who wrote a forthcoming book on how media outlets stoke anger to build audiences.

“Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online,” Mr. Stirewalt said. Social media sites and internet forums, he added, are “like a focus group for pure outrage.”

In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.

“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”

One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.

Underlying all variations of replacement rhetoric is the growing diversity of the United States over the past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than doubled, according to the Census Bureau.

Democratic politicians have generally been more supportive of immigration than Republicans, especially in the post-Trump era, and have pushed for more humane treatment of migrants and refugees. But the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally, which rose throughout the 1990s and 2000s, first began to decline under President Obama, a Democrat whom critics nicknamed the “deporter-in-chief.” There is no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens and others who are ineligible. And while Mr. Biden has laid out plans to expand legal immigration, federal agencies have expelled more than 1.3 million migrants at the southwest border on his watch, while continuing some of the more restrictive immigration policies begun by former President Trump.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory, sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders” in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced and invaded” by illegal immigrants...

 

Payton Gendron, 18-Year-Old White Supremacist, Massacres 10 in Buffalo Supermarket Racist Attack (VIDEO)

Most everyone has heard about Buffalo race murders by now.

Payton Gendron has pleaded not guilty in the attack. I've searched for the racist "Great Replacement" manifesto the shooter posted online, but it's been scrubbed. Posted in Google docs, the Google information overlords removed it within minutes of posting. The shooter fitted a Go Pro camera to his helmet and live streamed it on Twitch, which was also immediately taken down.

The left's diabolical partisan political exploitation of the murders was instantaneous. No surprise there, but more disgusting than ever. I scolded Joe Lockhart and Soledad O'Brien here and here.

Gendron killed a black security guard --- recently retired as a police officer of 30 years --- in a brief shootout.

The latest is at Buffalo News, "Community holds vigil, protests in wake of racially motivated mass shooting."

The main story's at morning newsletter from the New York Times, "Good morning. A massacre at a Buffalo supermarket was the deadliest in the U.S. this year":

A gunman embracing a white supremacist ideology opened fire yesterday afternoon at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three more. The mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States this year and among a spate of racist attacks in recent years.

The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, had driven more than 200 miles to stage the attack, and he livestreamed it as he fired at shoppers and store employees. He was arrested at the store and pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance.

Around the same time, a manifesto attributed to him appeared online, repeatedly invoking the racist idea that white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. The view is known as “replacement theory” and was once linked to the far-right fringe, but it has become increasingly mainstream.

Among the victims were a security guard and an 86-year-old mother of four who had stopped at the store on her way home from visiting her husband at the nursing home where he lives.

How the shooting unfolded Around 2:30 p.m., as shoppers filled the Tops supermarket, the suspect arrived wearing body armor, tactical gear and a helmet with a video camera attached. He carried an assault rifle with an anti-Black slur written on the barrel and began firing in the parking lot. Three victims were killed outside, and one was wounded.

Then the suspect went inside the store to continue his attack, briefly exchanging fire with the security guard before killing him. He went on to stalk victims throughout the store; “bodies were everywhere,” one witness said.

Shonnell Harris, a store manager, told The Buffalo News that she heard an estimated 70 shots and ran through the Tops, repeatedly falling down before escaping out back.

The gunman eventually returned to the front of the store. By then, the police had arrived, and he briefly put a gun to his neck before he began removing tactical gear as a form of surrender and the police tackled him.

The victims Of the 13 people who were shot, 11 were Black and two were white. Four worked at the Tops grocery. Few have been publicly identified.

The security guard who was killed was a former police officer — “a hero in our eyes,” said Joseph A. Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner.

Ruth Whitfield, 86, was a mother of four and “a mother to the motherless,” her son told The News. Her husband had moved into a nursing home years ago and she still visited every day. She had just visited him when she stopped at Tops to get something to eat, WGRZ reported.

The suspect

The attack appeared to be inspired by earlier mass shootings motivated by racial hatred, including a 2019 mosque shooting in New Zealand and a massacre at a Texas Walmart that same year, according to the manifesto.

In chilling detail, the document outlined a plan to kill as many Black people as possible, including the type of gun to use, a timeline, a specific parking spot and where to eat ahead of time.

Gendron wrote that he chose the area of the supermarket because it was home to the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in New York’s largely white Southern Tier. The police had surrounded his home outside Binghamton, N.Y., overnight.

“It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” said John Garcia, the local sheriff.

Federal law enforcement officials said they were investigating the shooting as a hate crime. The next court proceeding was set for Thursday.

More at Memorandum.