Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
Payton Gendron, the 19-year-old white male charged in the May mass shooting at a supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, reportedly left a 180-page manifesto that outlined his motivations:
“Most of all it was to spread awareness to my fellow Whites about the real problems the West is facing, and to encourage further attacks that will eventually start the war that will save the Western world, save the White race and allow for humanity to progress into more advanced civilizations.”
This fever dream is called “the great replacement. It’s the white-supremacist idea that liberal elites are conspiring to replace white Americans through immigration and birth-control policy and that it’s an existential threat to white culture,” says University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry. “The Buffalo shooter was very wrapped up in the replacement theory, which is the idea that Americans are being replaced by—for him, at least—immigrants. He was obsessed with the declining white birth rate and higher immigrant birth rate as a threat to American culture.”