US Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has argued that a majority of mass shootings that take place in the United States are done by white supremacists.
In an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday, Murphy called on Republicans to condemn “hateful theories about replacement” after a suspect involved in a shooting in Buffalo, New York cited the so-called “great replacement theory” in a manifesto published online for killing about a dozen Black people.
“You see this throughline from El Paso to Charleston to Buffalo in which white supremacists who feed off of this online conversation about the ‘replacement theory’, fed by mainstream conservative and Republican institutions, are turning their anger into mass violence,” Murphy said.
“And so this is a moment for my friends in the Republican Party, who more than occasionally endorse these hateful theories about replacement to stop it. To stop it, to stand down, to condemn this kind of talk, to stop suggesting that Muslims or immigrants or black people or Jews are a threat to society,” he continued, “because every time that they say things like that on the Senate floor, every time they go on Fox News and repeat that lie, they are unfortunately feeding this river of racist ideology into the brains of people who are contemplating mass violence.”
“I know that’s not the intention of my Republican colleagues, but they’ve just got to be really careful about the things that they say right now,” he added.
“Statements like Murphy's are what keeps the two-party rope-a-dope going, and convinces Americans they have an actual, functioning political system,” said American political analyst Daniel Patrick Welch.
“The whole of US history is a white supremacist experiment, from the tiny settler colonies on the east coast to the massive violence unleashed on natives who resist the exploitation of their land for pipelines and fracking and such,” continued Welch.
“It is a convenient trope in the cultural war since Republicans and the white conservatives who make up their political delegations have for two generations been the unapologetic defenders of status quo systemic racism,” the writer said in comments to Press TV Tuesday.
“But I think a bit of brand fatigue starts to creep in when all you have to say is ‘We're not the Klan.’ Especially when your party is responsible for the insanely racist a xenophobic Omnibus Crime Bill in 1994, and brought about the sodomizing of the leader of the most prosperous African country in 2011,” he noted.
"’We came, we saw, he died’ is the more appropriate mantle for the party of the Klan and the atom bomb. And until the oppressed of the US--black Americans, workers, and the poor--rebel against the party that does not even begin to represent them, they will never achieve their own liberation,” he concluded.
Amid the outpouring of grief and shock over the Saturday mass shooting in Buffalo, Black residents on Sunday expressed anguish about the racism and white supremacy that fueled the deadliest massacre in modern American history.
Protesters rallied at a Black Lives Matter demonstration a day after an alleged white supremacist sympathizer shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket that largely served African Americans.
The demonstrators aired grievances about their communities being forgotten by authorities on the largely impoverished East Side. They called on politicians to direct more resources to protect Buffalo’s Black residents, whose lives and sense of security have long been disturbed by racism and gun violence.
Among the victims killed or injured, 11 of them were Black.
A number of Democrats and some Republicans have denounced their GOP colleagues for what they call scaremongering around immigration and race, following the deadly incident.
According to the “great replacement theory,” there is an intentional effort, through immigration, to have white Americans replaced with people of color.
The 18-year-old gunman, in his manifesto published online, cited other mass shooters as his inspiration.
In the wake of the shooting, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) alleged that top House Republicans had “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy.”
“History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them,” she added in a tweet on Monday.