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...

 

Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies

At Amazon, Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies.

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...

 

Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us!

At Amazon, Renaud Camus, "You Will Not Replace Us!"

Great Replacement Theory

You'll be hearing more of this "great replacement theory" in the days ahead. It's not a conspiracy as much as a real theory that can be tested against evidence. Cathy Young, for example, debunks it, here: "The Replacement Theory -- And Terrorist Practice" (Via Memeorandum). 

The American Mind, the popular "national conservatism" website, defends the theory here: "Replace the Ruling Class," and "Shaping the Perfect Subjects: The managerial class wants to replace America’s core demographic with one it can more easily control."

Fox News --- and Trucker Carlson in particular --- have come under heavy fire since the killings. I quit watching his show, but obviously the Democrat Party's open borders policies are predicated on the supply a steady stream of illegal alien public welfare supplicants to build a permanent leftist-socialist-immigrant voting coalition. 

I did catch this segment at the time, last year, featuring Mark Styen (with video snippets of Tucker). Good times, heh:

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.

Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod, Zelensky

At Amazon, Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod, Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United the World.

Democrats' Electability Argument Falling Flat in 2022

From Amy Walter, at the Cook Report:

For the last six years, the one thing that has kept the Democratic Party unified and motivated is Donald Trump. Fear and loathing got Democrats to turn out in the 2018 midterms, and kept those voters engaged in 2020. Sure, the party was divided ideologically and generationally, with liberals and younger voters flocking to the Bernie Sanders wing and older, Black and more moderate Democrats sticking with Joe Biden. But, at the end of the day, both sides understood that the most important and existential issue was defeating Trump.

This strategy for the 2018 midterms was summarized best by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's slogan of "Just win, baby." Primaries were for picking the candidates who could win these swing CDs, not for intra-party ideological warfare. In 2020, Democrats rallied behind the more centrist Biden simply because they believed he provided Democrats the best chance to beat Trump that fall.

But, with Trump no longer in the White House and Biden's approval ratings underwater, the electability message is falling flat in Democratic primaries. In 2018, Democratic candidates prevailed in GOP-leaning CDs by leaning into a message of bipartisanship. Today, however, a restive Democratic base, discouraged by a lack of action on many of their key issues (like climate and student loan debt), and frustrated by GOP attacks on issues like abortion and election integrity, want fighters, not unifiers as their candidates...

RTWT.

 

Josh Weidmann, The End of Anxiety

At Amazon, Josh Weidmann, The End of Anxiety: The Biblical Prescription for Overcoming Fear, Worry, and Panic.

'Paranoid'

Black Sabbath. So classic.  

For Harvard Crimson's Editorial Board, Facts Are for Losers

It's Dara Horn, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "It turns out that nobody’s SAT scores can provide immunity to propaganda":

Twenty-five years later, I still remember the theatrics involved with becoming an editor at the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper produced by Harvard undergraduates every day for the past century and a half. The newspaper’s office had a room upstairs called the Sanctum, so named because only those who had jumped through the paper’s prescribed journalistic hoops were allowed to enter—and then only for Sunday night editorial meetings, at which the coming week’s worth of unsigned editorials were debated and approved under strict secrecy. Newly minted editors were welcomed into the room with the question, “What are your politics?” One’s answer determined the side of the room where one would sit for these debates.

Many participants cared deeply about these discussions—though this being the 1990s, many more didn’t, and attended mainly for the fun of it. My peers were largely the children of baby-boomer parents who had morphed from flag-burning hippies to mall-hopping yuppies; Gen Xers like us took people’s self-important opinions with a very large grain of salt. In the Sanctum, I sat on the left by vague default, but didn’t attach much meaning to it. I was far from alone: A good number of editors didn’t even bother to remain on their side of the Sanctum, instead simply choosing the comfiest chairs.

When I later became one of the editors responsible for drafting each week’s worth of unsigned opinions about subjects like university workers’ strikes, affirmative action, and the Clinton impeachment, I learned that the only real sign of success was to say something interesting enough to generate a dissent. The only way to do that, of course, was to marshal the facts and explain why they mattered. When an editorial prompted other editors to write a dissent objecting to it—about, for instance, a campus visit by China’s then-premier—it was the ultimate compliment. You’d actually had something to say.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for ages. My work as a writer for the past 20 years has been almost entirely solitary; none of my books involved convincing a roomful of people of my point of view. But I was reminded of this ancient student ritual last week when my phone blew up with messages from dozens of irate former Crimson editors, including many actual journalists, a group of alumni going back several decades.

The current Crimson editorial board, in a somewhat modified version of the procedures I remembered, had just published an unsigned editorial fully endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, reversing its position from two years earlier. There was no official editorial dissent. Afterward, copies of this editorial were posted publicly in undergraduate dining halls, just in case anyone missed it.

The BDS movement, as it’s known, is old news on college campuses and elsewhere; it’s been around long enough that it no longer bothers to hide its goal of eliminating the world’s only Jewish state. But I had to hand it to The Crimson for timing, given that the editorial followed several weeks of terror attacks in Israel during which 15 people were stabbed, shot and car-rammed to death while engaging in such provocative behaviors as drinking at a bar or walking down the street...

Keep reading. 

The Crimson editorial is outrageous, though not surprising. 

Read it here: "In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions and a Free Palestine."

And see, "The Crimson Faces Backlash Over Editorial Endorsing BDS Movement," and "To the Editor: From Six Crimson Alumni In Regard to BDS."

Duke Graduation Speaker 'Surprised' That Some Passages From Her Speech Were Taken From a Recent Commencement Speech at Harvard (VIDEO)

So surprising. *Eye-roll.*

If you plagiarize you're going to get caught. I catch a number of students plaigarizing every semester, and this is on simple assigned essays, not research papers. Students probably spend more time scouring the web than actually writing a four-page think piece. Sadly, even scraping stuff straight from Wikipedia is a thing. Even more sadly: When I notify my dean she does nothing but to tell me, "let this be a lesson for the student." 

Right. 

In other words, cheat, violate written college rules and ethical standards --- for which in the past a students could be suspended or expelled --- and get off scot-free. Not so fast, I say. I'll give the student a "0" on the assignment, and they can complain all they want. A plagiarized paper is worth nothing. *Sigh.*

At WSJ, "Duke Commencement Speaker Takes ‘Full Responsibility’ After Similarities in Speech Spark University Probe":

Parts of her speech included passages similar to those in a 2014 Harvard graduation speech; Duke says it is investigating the matter.

A Duke University student said she is taking “full responsibility” for parts of her commencement speech that included passages similar to those in a Harvard University graduation speech years ago, prompting a university probe.

Undergraduate commencement speaker Priya Parkash spoke to her fellow classmates at Duke’s graduation ceremony on Sunday. The following day the Duke Chronicle—the university’s student newspaper—reported that several passages of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to that of a Harvard speech in 2014 given by then-student Sarah Abushaar. Duke is investigating the matter, a spokesman said.

A public-relations representative for Ms. Parkash said in an interview that she incorporated ideas for passages provided by friends without researching if they had been used previously. She didn’t find out until after the speech that those passages had come from a speech given at Harvard, her spokesman said.

“I was embarrassed and confused to find out too late that some of the suggested passages were taken from a recent commencement speech at another university,” Ms. Parkash said in an earlier statement provided through the PR firm. “I take full responsibility for this oversight and I regret if this incident has in any way distracted from the accomplishments of the Duke Class of 2022.”

Michael Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said the university is aware of the allegations and has “initiated a process to understand the facts of the situation.”

“Duke University expects all students to abide by their commitment to the Duke Community Standard in everything they do as students,” he said.

Parts of Ms. Parkash’s speech were similar to passages from Harvard undergraduate speaker Ms. Abushaar’s 2014 commencement address, with references to Harvard swapped for Duke.

Ms. Abushaar didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In her speech, Ms. Parkash spoke about her experience being Pakistani and going through airport security checkpoints, wearing Duke gear as a way to prove she wasn’t a threat. Ms. Abushaar made similar comments about going through airport security as a Middle Easterner in Harvard attire.

Both speakers joked about how their respective campuses could be their own independent countries.

“We had our own version of the Statue of Liberty, the John Harvard statue; our own embassies, the Harvard clubs of Boston and London; a tax collection agency, the Harvard Alumni Association; and endowment larger than more than half the world’s countries GDPs,” Ms. Abushaar said in her 2014 speech.

In Ms. Parkash’s speech on Sunday, she said, “We are home to several consulates…we also have our own version of Christ the Redeemer, the statue of James Buchanan Duke…we also have an IRS with its surprisingly bubbly fleet of tax collectors, the Duke Alumni Association; we also have the equivalent of the Federal Reserve, DUMAC, which manages an endowment larger than the GDP of one-third of the countries in the world”...

Yep. You can see that comparison at the video above.

 

Biden's Incoming Press Secretary Laughs When Asked Who Is Handling Baby Formula Crisis

From Katie Pavlich, at Townhall, "Incoming White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked onboard Air Force One Wednesday afternoon about the ongoing baby formula shortage rattling American parents."

"The shelves are wiped out," CBS News' @CHueyBurns says on the baby formula shortage in the U.S., calling it an "urgent need for families right now."

"You're starting to see pressure applied in terms of government accountability...A lot of questions about the supply chain." pic.twitter.com/hTju1wJbLS

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 9, 2022

Hilary Duff Poses Nude for Women's Health

There were some hilarious tweets last night. 

From Kathleen McKinley, for one, "I’m so glad she is at peace with this hideous body."

At Women's Health, "Hilary Duff Is Seeing The Light":

The actress spent years trying to live up to Hollywood’s standards. Now she’s focused on what makes her feel happy and whole and content—on the inside.

“I’m proud of my body. I’m proud that it’s produced three children for me,” @HilaryDuff tells WH. “I’ve gotten to a place of being peaceful with the changes my body has gone through." pic.twitter.com/ZqfZ11VAck

— Women's Health (@WomensHealthMag) May 10, 2022

And while @HilaryDuff works hard in the gym, she says “the most important part of the system” is feeling happy, whole, and content on the inside. These are the routines and affirmations that have helped her see the light: https://t.co/q25q0y1iCE pic.twitter.com/JERhrg5s4S

— Women's Health (@WomensHealthMag) May 10, 2022

Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War

 At Amazon, Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871.

How Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot Escaped Russia (VIDEO)

I don't listen to this band. Not particularly to my tastes, though your mileage may vary.

I like their rebellious politics though. Frankly, what other politics could they have in Putin's Russia?

There new music video is here, "Hate Fuck." 

At the New York Times, "Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends":

After more than a decade of activism, Maria Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier to evade the police — and a widening crackdown by President Vladimir Putin.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Maria V. Alyokhina first came to the attention of the Russian authorities — and the world — when her punk band and performance art group Pussy Riot staged a protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.

For that act of rebellion in 2012, she was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” She remained determined to fight Mr. Putin’s system of repression, even after being jailed six more times since last summer, each stint for 15 days, always on trumped-up charges aimed at stifling her political activism.

But in April, as Mr. Putin cracked down harder to snuff out any criticism of his war in Ukraine, the authorities announced that her effective house arrest would be converted to 21 days in a penal colony. She decided it was time to leave Russia — at least temporarily — and disguised herself as a food courier to evade the Moscow police who had been staking out the friend’s apartment where she was staying. She left her cellphone behind as a decoy and to avoid being tracked.

A friend drove her to the border with Belarus, and it took her a week to cross into Lithuania. In a studio apartment in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, she agreed to an interview to describe a dissident’s harrowing escape from Mr. Putin’s Russia.

“I was happy that I made it, because it was an unpredictable and big” kiss-off to the Russian authorities, Ms. Alyokhina said, using a less polite term. “I still don’t understand completely what I’ve done,” she admitted, dressed in black except for a fanny pack with a rainbow belt.

Ms. Alyokhina, 33, has spent her entire adult life fighting for her country to respect its own Constitution and the most basic human rights, like freedom of expression. After being freed early from prison in December 2013, she and another member of Pussy Riot founded Mediazona, an independent news outlet focused on crime and punishment in Russia.

She also wrote a memoir, “Riot Days,” and traveled internationally performing a show based on the book. Though her dream was to tour with it in Russia, only three venues agreed to host the show, and all faced repercussions.

Ms. Alyokhina was committed to remaining in Russia despite regular surveillance and pressure from the authorities. But now she has joined the tens of thousands of Russians who have fled since the invasion of Ukraine.

Alyokhina, whose friends call her Masha, had bitten her nails down to stubs, and she puffed almost unceasingly on a vape or on Marlboro Lights. She made the journey in black, three-inch platform boots without laces — a nod to her many stints in jail, where shoelaces are confiscated.

In prison, she and others instead threaded moist towelettes through the eyelets of their shoes to keep them on. As a statement, she and other members of Pussy Riot will wear them while they perform during a tour, starting on May 12 in Berlin, to raise money for Ukraine.

When it first began more than a decade ago, Pussy Riot seemed as much publicity stunt as political activism. But if their protest in the Moscow cathedral — where they sang a “Punk Prayer” ridiculing the symbiosis that had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin — seemed overwrought at the time, today it appears prescient.

The church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill, recently blessed Russian troops going to Ukraine, and the European Union put his name on a proposed list of people to be sanctioned.

Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.

Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.

“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”

During the interview she was surrounded by other members of the group, now a collective with about a dozen members. Most of them had also recently fled Russia, including her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein.

Ms. Shtein had chosen to leave Russia a month before, also evading restrictions on her movement by sneaking out in a delivery-service uniform. Her decision came after someone posted a sign on the door of the apartment she shared with Ms. Alyokhina accusing them of being traitors...

Keep reading.

 

Douglas Murray, The War on the West

At Amazon, Douglas Murray, The War on the West.

'The Way'

Here's Fastball:

Twitter, the Supreme Court, the Progressive Revolution

From Caroline Glick, at the Jewish News Syndicate, "As long as revolutionary progressives maintain their control over key U.S. national institutions, Republican election victories will be insufficient to save the U.S. and restore liberty to its citizens":

May 8, 2022 / JNS) America is in the throes of a revolution. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, progressives now control nearly every national institution. They control Wall Street, Silicon Valley, universities, local school boards, the teachers’ unions, the entertainment industry, the vast majority of the media, the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. military, and currently, the White House and both houses of Congress.

Progressives use their control over these institutions to change both the character of the United States and the rules of the game in a manner that will enable them to perpetuate their power regardless of the sentiments of the American people.

Progressives are rewriting American history. They are taking aim at God and believers, and at the nuclear family, while indoctrinating children against their families and their country. There is no area of human endeavor that progressives have not politicized.

One of the last national institutions where the conservatives hold sway is the Supreme Court. And last Monday, the Supreme Court came under a malicious assault whose clear goal is to subvert its independence. In a move without precedent in U.S. history, Politico published a draft Supreme Court decision written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is a member of the Court’s conservative majority.

Today’s Supreme Court comprises five conservatives, one centrist and three progressives. Alito’s draft explained why the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which removed the power of states to determine the legality of pregnancy termination, making abortions legal nationwide, was unconstitutional and overturned it. If Alito’s decision, which is supported by his fellow conservative justices, becomes final, the power to determine the legality of pregnancy termination will devolve back to the individual states.

Second, the leaker sought to incite righteous rage among progressives, that will pressure the two remaining moderates in the Democratic majority in the Senate to vote to abrogate the Senate filibuster. By preventing Republicans from using the filibuster, the razor-thin Democrat majority will be able to ram through radical legislation ahead of their expected losses in the congressional elections in November.

Among other things, unfettered by the filibuster, progressives will be able to expand the number of justices on the Court from nine to 15. And if they move fast enough, President Joe Biden will be able to pack the court with an additional six progressive justices and thus effectively seize permanent control of the high court.

As for those elections, all major polls foresee progressives suffering crushing, historic defeats in both houses. Until Obama’s presidency, when progressives seized control of the Democrat Party, polls like the current ones would have compelled the Democrats to abandon their progressive policies and make a ninety-degree turn to the center. But today, every demonstration of public opposition to progressive policies convinces progressive revolutionaries to double down. When last year parents began protesting anti-American, racist and increasingly pornographic indoctrination of their children in K-12 schools, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to treat protesting parents like “domestic terrorists.”

Progressive-controlled state and local governments have responded to public outcries against skyrocketing crime rates by passing laws banning pre-trial detention and bail, sending violent criminals back on the streets.

In every sphere of public endeavor, progressive politicians, bureaucrats and activists have met public opposition and protest with tyranny and rebuke.

One of the main weapons in the progressive arsenal is disinformation—the deliberate distortion of information to advance an agenda...

This disinformation campaign brings us to Twitter, the social media platform purchased last month by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past decade, Twitter became the social media network with the largest influence on the public discourse. No self-respecting journalist, activist or policymaker can afford not to have an active account.

Twenty years ago, the internet and the social media platforms it generated became the largest free market of ideas in human history. They were also the engine for political victories for conservative politicians in the United States. For the first time, the internet gave conservative candidates the ability to communicate directly with voters, without the mediation of liberal/progressive media behemoths. All of this began to change during Obama’s presidency, as more and more conservative voices suffered a spectrum of sanctions, from shadow bans, which blocked their audience from seeing what they were posting, to banishment from Facebook and other social media platforms.

The process accelerated and became more extreme in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump’s victory was a grave embarrassment for the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Clinton blamed them for her loss. Her basic claim was that had Facebook, Twitter and Google not permitted the Trump campaign more or less the same use of their platforms as they ostensibly offer everyone, Trump would not have won. As Clinton and her supporters put it, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their colleagues were supposed to prevent Trump and his supporters from “disseminating disinformation,” that is, campaign materials, on their platforms. Freedom of expression, Clinton and her supporters insisted, wasn’t for everyone.

Chastened, to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020, Zuckerberg donated $340 million to election non-profit groups he founded for the purpose of increasing Democrat vote numbers in key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter initiated a censorship campaign against Trump and his supporters the likes of which no one had ever experienced.

That censorship campaign reached its height weeks before the election, when the New York Post published the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. President Joe Biden’s son, a crack addict, had abandoned his laptop in a repair shop in Delaware. After his efforts to return the laptop were unsuccessful, the owner of the store turned its contents over to the FBI because the computer contained evidence that Biden and his family may have committed several felonies.

At a minimum, the contents of the laptop exposed that Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from foreign firms with direct ties to the Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian governments. Hunter Biden seemed to implicate his father in the influence-peddling operations in several of his emails.

The Post story was explosive because it was entirely true. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. All the details of the deals were authentic. They exposed a web of influence peddling with hostile governments that made clear that Biden and his family were ripe for extortion by those governments. Yet, rather than allow their platforms to be used to inform the American people of this information, Twitter led the way in preventing the public from hearing about it. Twitter de-platformed the New York Post and private users who dared to link to the story. Facebook followed suit. Fifty retired U.S. intelligence and security chiefs proclaimed the story was “Russian disinformation.”

It took a year for the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that the laptop was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the New York Post stories were entirely true. In the meantime, in the name of fighting “disinformation,” Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants had denied the American people access to information that, as post-election polls made clear, would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.

Since its first days in office, the Biden administration has openly pressured technology giants to increase their censorship and block conservative voices, claiming that such silencing and suppression is necessary to fight racism and fake news...