Extreme right-wing ideologies are becoming an increasingly big problem for the US

Online extremism is nothing new, but who calls it out is becoming contentious, writes Holly Baxter

Latisha (right), a clerk at Tops market who called 911 when when a gunman opened fire at the store, is consoled during services at True Bethel Baptist Church (Getty)

What makes a terrorist a terrorist? That was the question this week after a shooter entered a grocery store in Buffalo, NY on Saturday and killed 10 people (and seriously injured two others). Eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron live-streamed his attack on the Amazon-owned streamer site Twitch, travelling a reported three hours to a supermarket he knew catered to mostly Black clientele. Early reports indicate that all the people who died were Black. As always with such tragedies, the stories have come pouring in, heartbreaking in their mundanity: a grandmother shot while picking up a cake for her grandson’s birthday party; a hero security guard killed while trying to protect others; a kindly taxi driver and a substitute teacher gunned down while doing their weekly shop.

Gendron appears to have published a white supremacist manifesto online, and his ideology is plain to see. He details his belief in the “great replacement” theory, often alluded to by far-right figures, some Fox News commentators, and members of the Republican Party. This conspiracy theory – which posits that white people in western countries will soon be “replaced” by Black and brown immigrants who are asked or paid to move by nefarious left-wing figures, including Democrats – is popular on unmoderated message boards such as 4chan and 8chan. But it’s also mainstream enough that elected GOP politicians openly, and casually, mention it.

It seems clear that the Buffalo shooting was a hate crime and an act of terrorism. It’s also clear that extreme right-wing ideologies are becoming an increasingly big problem for the US, and indeed for the west. The US is a highly conservative country that has always had its fair share of far-right extremists, including the Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people (including 19 children at a daycare centre) in 1995. McVeigh and Nichols were paranoid, libertarian right-wingers who feared that the government wanted to control private citizens.

Ironically, they had much in common with the Republican straw man “Antifa”, which is bandied around today. Indeed, Republicans on the far-Maga end of the spectrum in 2022 talk a good Antifa line, imagining a utopian and essentially anarchist future wherein conservatives, armed to the back teeth with weapons, live unimpeded by rules in small, self-governed groups, while at the same time scaremongering about the collapse of polite society supposedly soon to be brought about by middle-of-the-road liberals like Joe Biden.

Gendron was from a well-to-do family in a mostly conservative area of New York state, which is much bigger, and more politically diverse, than New York City. Conklin, the town where Gendron grew up and was living with his parents, is a tiny, 5,000-population town, which the 2020 census shows as 89 per cent white and 1 per cent Black. Though he clearly spent a good amount of time online, Gendron could hardly claim to have seen his own community change much demographically while he lived there. Ten years ago, when he was eight years old, the town was 96 per cent white – and the Black population was the same, at 1 per cent (it was the Latino population that accounted for the slight decrease in the percentage of white people in the town).

Gendron nevertheless seems to have been radicalised behind his screen, apparently believing a theory that should have been disproved by his own eyes when he walked down the street, attended school, worked in his local deli, or frequented his favourite diner. He had to look up a town that was majority Black, and then drive more than 200 miles, to find enough targets.

The speed with which online content can radicalise such people is scary. In 2018, a Canadian terrorist attack perpetrated by a 29-year-old van driver killed 11 and injured 15. Alek Minassian was an “incel” – that is, a misogynist who defines himself as “involuntarily celibate” through a lack of attention from women – and almost all of his victims were women. Like Gendron, he was a quiet young man who frequented 4chan. Incels have a lot of crossover with white supremacists on such forums, referring to women as “femoids” and “fembots” and often trading ideas about how killing them isn’t a moral crime because they are “subhuman”. Similar language is frequently used about Black people in the same spaces, with users often adopting the image of “Pepe”, a cartoon frog, to identify themselves as both misogynists and racists.

As we gear up for the midterm elections and face the prospect of another Trump run in 2024, the world will have to consider how we deal with such angry young men. Though it’s been trendy in the past to refer to them as “left behind” or working-class, the truth is that many of the men who commit such atrocities are from wealthy backgrounds and want for little. They are socially, rather than financially, alienated – and usually the alienation is due to their own online habits and their involvement in misanthropic outlets.

Clearly, there are people on forums like 4chan and 8chan who work to make white supremacism and other hateful ideologies seem like palatable and tantalising prospects. The touting of theories such as the great replacement theory works to convince vulnerable men that, like Islamist extremists, they are somehow doing moral work through mass killings. They are often called upon to show that they “won’t take” some imagined slight to their group “lying down”. In some forums, news events are seized upon to make such points, sometimes to bizarre effect – one meme circulating on Reddit after the release of a memo about Roe v Wade even talked about how incels’ future wives had failed to materialise because their mothers had aborted them.

Online extremism is nothing new, but the question of who calls it out is becoming contentious. Some Republicans were quick to denounce Gendron; others have stayed unforgivably quiet. If Trump does make it back onto the campaign trail, he will no doubt be asked – as he was about the violent, white supremacist rally in Charlottesville back in 2016 – whether the Buffalo shooting was an act of terrorism. This time, it will be even harder to equivocate about there being “very fine people on both sides”.