The Atlantic

Conservatives Are Defending a Sanitized Version of ‘The Great Replacement’

Their reaction to the Buffalo shooting shows that the racist theory has now entered the Republican mainstream.
Source: The Atlantic; Alex Wong / Michael Schwartz / Janos Kummer / Ting Shen / Getty

Updated at 10:54 a.m. ET on May 19, 2022.

Three years ago, when a white-supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas, the reaction from the right was unreserved condemnation. When another white-supremacist fanatic killed 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, last week, the reaction from some figures on the right was to acknowledge that the guy had a point about this whole “replacement” thing.

Large sections of the manifesto attributed to the Buffalo shooter were the writings of the perpetrator of another . Both share the premise that violence against nonwhite people is justified to prevent “white genocide” or the “replacement” of white Americans by nonwhite immigrants. As the alleged Buffalo shooter put it, he carried out the attack because “all black people are replacers just by existing in White countries.” I would offer to explain how , but who

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