Chris Lange, FISM News
The deadly attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY which left ten dead and three injured quickly regressed into political posturing. Within hours after information about the horrific incident was released, Democratic lawmakers, liberal pundits, and mainstream media outlets began pointing fingers at Republicans, whom they accuse of fomenting white supremacy and racial hatred.
The Saturday shooting has been regarded as the deadliest in the United States this year, with evidence showing that the attack was motivated by race. The suspect in the shooting, Payton Gendron, who is white, wrote a lengthy, racist manifesto ahead of the shooting, according to several reports. The 18-year-old is also purportedly a staunch proponent of the so-called “great replacement theory,” a belief that the government is trying to replace white people with minorities.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Fox News executives in which he blamed host Tucker Carlson of inspiring the shooting. Schumer demanded that the network “immediately cease all dissemination of false white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theories on your network.”
“For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote in his letter about the “Great Replacement Theory,” according to the New York Times. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”
Schumer later revealed that he declined an invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss the unsubstantiated and potentially dangerous accusation.
“@TuckerCarlson invited me on his show tonight to debate the letter I sent to @FoxNews,” Schumer tweeted. “I’m declining. Tucker Carlson needs to stop promoting the racist, dangerous ‘Replacement Theory.”
“Again, Chuck Schumer is a federal official. He is the leading Democrat in the United States Senate and he is calling for media censorship,” Carlson said in response on his show Tuesday evening.
“There was a time 18 months ago that would have been considered a direct violation of the First Amendment. We hear it every day. ‘Let’s throw them in jail.’ We wanted to hear more from Chuck Schumer about this,” Carlson continued, calling the senator a “coward” for declining his invitation to appear on the show.
Schumer also attacked those he called MAGA Republicans, seemingly in an attempt to tie those who call for immigration reform with those who are proponents of the Great Replacement Theory.
“Every time MAGA Republicans or pundits vilify wrongly immigrants and call them invaders, every time they falsely claim that millions of undocumented people cast ballots in our elections, and every time loud bigoted voices bemoan the disintegration of an imagined ‘classic’ America, the subtext is clear: these hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat — a threat — to the American way of life,” Schumer said.
Schumer wasn’t alone in the left’s attempt to smear Republicans in the wake of the tragedy.
In an op-ed for Rolling Stone, Talia Lavin alleged that Gendron is a “mainstream Republican,” and that the “driving engine of Republican politics” is an “obsession with racial composition and white fertility.”
“The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican Party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic,” Lavin continued. “What unites murderers like Gendron, and the long list of White supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican Party is the dream of a White nation.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board claimed Republicans have allowed the “normalization” of White Supremacy and countless left-leaning accounts have made similar claims on social media.
Many Republicans came out in defense of their party, saying that it was ridiculous to try to use the acts of an apparent mentally-ill radical to characterize a political party.
“Yet again, the liberal media have decided that they couldn’t let a crisis go to waste without further inflaming not only partisan divisions, but venomous racial tensions,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told Fox News Digital in response to the unfounded accusations. “They couldn’t let a crisis go to waste without further inflaming not only partisan divisions,” Houck said.
“Both sides have some fringe members, but the 99 percent are not racist. Let’s just be candid about that,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) stated.
“I don’t think that there’s anybody in the Republican Party, I honestly believe there’s nobody that wants to enable, enhance or anyway support white supremacy,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) told The Hill.