The Buffalo shooter wrote racist screeds online before targeting and killing people in a majority-Black neighborhood. We look at the incident’s similarities to other white supremacist killings, particularly the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Amy Spitalnick is the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit organization that successfully sued the white supremacist organizers of Unite the Right. Spitalnick says tactics such as live-streaming are characteristic of previous acts of white supremacist terrorism, and calls for systemic change and preventative measures amid a clear pattern of violence. “This is precisely part of a cycle of white
Look, what happened in Buffalo is not an isolated incident. The shooter is not a, quote-unquote, “lone wolf.” This is precisely part of a cycle of white supremacist violence in which each attack inspires the next one, made all the more dangerous by an increasingly normalized replacement theory ideology that’s permeating through the Republican Party right now. And so it’s impossible to separate this attack from the cycle of attacks we’ve seen in recent years — Charleston, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso — January 6, to an extent, fits right into this pattern — and, of course, now Buffalo, in addition to the record-level hate crimes we’ve seen against so many communities — the Black community, the Asian community and many others. And so, again, it’s important to understand this within that cycle.
How we break that cycle requires quite a bit, and it requires a sort of accountability we saw in Charlottesville for those responsible for that violence. But you can’t simply sue
— source democracynow.org | May 20, 2022