The Weekly Sift

Saturday we had yet another race massacre, this one in Buffalo. We don’t have to debate about the killer’s motives, because posting a manifesto about “white replacement” or “white genocide” has become a standard part of such killing sprees.

The mainstream media tends not to point out this trend, instead focusing on “troubled” young men with “mental health” issues. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the real issue is much simpler: The killers believe what Republicans are telling them.

I started putting this together after the El Paso shooting in 2019. I can’t say whether or not Robert Crusius was mentally ill when he targeted Hispanics at a WalMart, because his actions made perfect sense if you took seriously what Trump had been saying over and over: Mexicans are invading our country. If your country is being invaded, isn’t the most obvious response to take military gear to the border and kill the invaders? What’s mentally ill about that?

Same thing here. Payton Gendron has been told time and again that there’s a plot to take America away from the white race, and that this plot will eventually result in racial extinction. If he believes that, what’s the logical response?

High-profile people like Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elise Stefanik may not explicitly tell people to go out and kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews, but how does anything less deal with the problem they describe?

This would be a perfect time for Republicans to purge their ranks, to openly reject white replacement theory and the people who promote it. But they won’t, because WRT is the underground root system that connects all their issues. Without white replacement, the MAGA playbook is an incoherent mess.

Today’s featured post will flesh out that argument. I’m still working on it, so it’s hard to predict when it will appear.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: America has had its one-millionth Covid death. Russia had a very bad week, both in Ukraine and diplomatically. Women (and the men who care about them) continued to react to the prospect of the Supreme Court taking their rights away. There’s an important primary in Pennsylvania tomorrow. John Durham’s endless political witch hunt is finally bringing someone to court this week. Texas got hot this weekend — who could have imagined? — and the electrical grid strained to cope.

The schedule is out the window today. Things will post when I get them done.