A Preventable Atrocity
On the Buffalo massacre, Biden & Co. wave the bloody shirt while ignoring the red flag
Our ridiculous president traveled to Buffalo, New York yesterday, with the twin objective of comforting the afflicted and smearing the political opposition.
In his remarks after meeting with the families of those killed in a horrible mass shooting, Biden said one or two things that were correct, e.g. that it was a terrorist attack. But then he descended into crude partisanship, all but accusing the Republican Party of complicity in the crime. In Biden’s telling, the GOP has lent credence to a racist “replacement theory” that motivated the shooter. This is the claim that in America, the white majority is being inexorably whittled down by a flood of immigrant minorities, and that the process is being engineered by a conspiracy of elite groups.
But for the President to give the impression that replacement theory is a creation of the radical right was more than a trifle disingenuous. For as a matter of fact, this supposedly white supremacist notion originated on his side of the ideological divide.
The idea that inexorable demographic change is remaking American politics and creating a durable Democratic majority has been around since the turn of the century. It was popularized in a bestselling 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority by John B. Judis and Ruy A. Teixeira. Their basic thesis was that if current trends continued, the falling birthrate among white Americans, the higher birthrate among minority groups and continuing high levels of immigration would fundamentally transform national politics, relegating the Republican Party to permanent minority status.
If current trends continue—that was the flaw in Judis and Teixeira’s argument. For when it comes to politics and culture, straight-line predictions are seldom reliable and though The Emerging Democratic Majority marshaled many statistics, its own straight-line prediction turned out to be quite wrong. First, the country’s white majority population has in fact remained stable or declined only a little, depending on how the data is massaged. Second, the authors erred in supposing that minority groups and immigrants would inevitably gravitate toward the Democrats. For with the passage of years the party has drifted farther and farther to the left, and its energies are increasingly consumed by issues of scant interest to most minorities. It can safely be assumed that transgender ideology has not much appeal to immigrants who are coming to America in search of economic opportunity and a better life.
More generally, the idea that minorities—BIPOC—as progressives have christened them—constitute some kind of monolithic political bloc has been exposed as the delusion it always was. This is apparent for example in the mutual hostility between blacks and Asians, an unwelcome reality that progressives have tried to paper over by designating the latter as “White adjacent.”
To their credit, Judis and Teixeira have since conceded that their version of replacement theory was mistaken. But The Emerging Democratic Majority did succeed in telling Democrats and progressives exactly what they wanted to hear: that the future belonged to them. It was a heady thought and sometimes their triumphalism took ugly forms, as when Jimmy Fallon’s studio audience greeted with laughter and cheers a news item claiming that for the first time, white people had declined as a percentage of the US population.
So apparently it was just fine for the Left to promote replacement theory, but racist and xenophobic for the Right to notice that fact.
Actually both sides were and are wrong—not only on the facts but on the moral calculus. For there’s a problem with replacement theory beyond those already mentioned. People on the Right who tout it are flirting with racism or, in the case of the radical Right, embracing racism. And the same is true of those on the Left who’ve adopted the idea that changes in the racial makeup of America will hand them power. For anyone who picks it up, replacement theory is a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
Anyhow, there was Joe Biden in Buffalo, bloviating away about replacement theory and white supremacy and assault weapons and the need to do something. And there was Senator Chuck Schumer, sending a letter to Fox News management, demanding that the network make Tucker Carlson shut up about replacement theory. Gun control and censorship: That’s been the Democratic Party’s characteristically knee-jerk response to the Buffalo mass shooting.
Biden and Schumer and the chorus of Democrats and progressives who parrot their line have overlooked on thing, however. The Buffalo massacre could easily have been prevented. For New York State, where this terrorist attack occurred, has what is called a Red Flag Law:
The Red Flag Law, also known as the extreme risk protection order law, is effective in New York State as of August 24, 2019. The law prevents individuals who show signs of being a threat to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing any kind of firearm.
The Red Flag Law provides all necessary procedural safeguards to ensure that no firearm is removed without due process while ensuring that tragedies, like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, are not repeated.
This new law builds on New York's strongest in the nation gun laws and makes New York the first in the United States to empower its teachers and school administrators to prevent school shootings by pursuing court intervention.
Yeah, right.
The Buffalo shooter—I will not mention his name—was referred by the administration at his high school to law enforcement after making “threatening statements.” He was interviewed by state police investigators and underwent a mental health evaluation but no action was taken to deprive him of access to firearms under the provisions of the state’s Red Flag Law. Thus he passed a background check and was able legally to purchase the weapons he used in his terrorist attack.
This was a tragic, glaring, infuriating dereliction of duty. And it raises a question that Democrats and progressives would doubtless prefer to avoid: If New York’s Red Flag Law, which actually put the Buffalo shooter on law enforcement’s radar, wasn’t good enough to stop him from going on a murderous rampage—what law would be?
Biden was correct. The Buffalo shooter was a white male. The Oath Keeper leader also a white male. Zero coincidence. White male supremacy has always been and remains the greatest domestic terrorist threat tracked by DHS, DOJ and the FBI. Study U.S. history. No amount of hating women will change the fact that males commit the vast majority of violence in the world.