US shooter embraced racist ‘replacement’ theory online

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WASHINGTON – The teenager charged with shooting dead 10 African-Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York followed an insidious racist creed gaining ground among white Americans that minorities are taking over society.

The 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron took explicit inspiration from the white supremacist gunman who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

The Christchurch killer had warned in a manifesto of a “Great Replacement” of white Christians of European descent by Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, and others, a theory that has found an increasing echo in American right-wing politics and on cable news.

Lifting often word-for-word from the rambling text, Gendron produced a chilling 180-page manifesto of his own – in which he stated his goal: to “kill as many blacks as possible”.

Gendron himself came from a rural town in New York state that had a very small number of non-white residents.

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