In Buffalo, Biden Faces Racism He Promised to Fight –

Washington (AP) – When Joe Biden speaks of His decision to vote Against President Donald Trump in 2020, the story always begins with Charlotte. He said torchbearers shouted fanatical slogans, forcing him to join what he called a “fight for the American soul.”

Today Biden faces his latest outbreak of hatred after a white supremacist targeted blacks at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people, the deadliest racist attack since he sat in position.

President and First Lady Jill Biden will visit the city on Tuesday, where their first stop will be a makeshift memorial outside the supermarket. They will also meet in person with the victim’s families, first responders and local officials before the president gives a public comment.

In his speech, Biden intended to call for stricter gun laws and urge Americans to renounce racism and national diversity, the White House said.

This is a message Biden has delivered several times since becoming the first president to specifically respond to white supremacy in his inaugural address, calling it “the internal terrorism we face.” However, that belief remains a ingrained threat at a time when his administration has been involved in crises involving pandemics, inflation and war in Ukraine.

“It’s important he reaches out to families and communities and shows compassion,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP. “But we’re more concerned that it won’t happen in the future.”

It’s unclear how Biden will try to do this. Proposals to limit new weapons have generally been blocked by Republicans. Furthermore, racism, which has spread to Charlottesville, Virginia, seems to have only spread.

The White House said the president and first lady “mourned the loss of 10 lives in a senseless and heinous mass shooting.” Three other people were injured. Most of the victims were black.

According to the White House, Biden was informed of the shooting by his counselor, Liz Sherwood-Randall, before attending a church service Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, near the family home. He called again and was told that law enforcement had determined the attack was racist.

New York Governor Katie Hochul, a Democrat, told Buffalo Radio that she invited Biden to town.

“I said, ‘Lord. “President, he will be strong if he comes here,” Hochul said. “This community is suffering so much and seeing the President of the United States showing them the attention that Buffalo doesn’t always pay.”

On Monday, Biden paid a special tribute to one of their victims, Retired Police Officer Aaron Solter, who worked as a security guard at the store. He said his confession was obtained through torture.

18-year-old Peyton Gendron was arrested at a supermarket and charged with murder. He was not guilty.

Prior to the hunt, Gendron posted an entire stream of racism and anti-Semitism on the Internet. The author of the document describes himself as a supporter of Dylan Ruff, who killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Brenton Taranto, who hit mosques in New Zealand in 2019..

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Gendron was “a man with hatred in his heart, soul and mind” and called the store attack an “absolute racist hate crime”.

So far, investigators are looking for Gendron’s connection to the so -called “great replacement” theory that irrationally argues that whites are deliberately outnumbered by other races because of immigration or higher birth rates. .

Racist ideology often accompanies anti-Semitism, of which Jews are the culprits. During the “United Rights” march in Charlottesville in 2017, whites sang “We will not be replaced by Jews”.

“Many of the dark rumors still exist today,” White House spokeswoman Carine Jean-Pierre said Monday. “And the president was as determined as he was. . . “To make sure we fight those forces of hatred, evil and violence.”

In the years since Charlottesville, the theory of replacement has shifted from the online frontier to the political right. A third of U.S. adults believe there is a “group of people trying to replace Native Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views,” according to a December poll by the Associated Press at NORC Center. For research in public affairs.

Tucker Carlson, a well -known Fox News presenter, accused Democrats of orchestrating mass migration to consolidate their power.

“The country has been stolen by American citizens,” he said on Aug. 23, 2021.

He reiterated the same theme a month later, saying “this policy has been called a great successor, replacing hereditary Americans with more obedient people from distant lands.”

The Carlson show regularly gets the highest ratings on cable news and responded to the commotion on Monday night by accusing the Liberals of silencing naysayers.

“So, because a mentally ill teenager kills strangers, you can’t express your political views out loud,” he said.

His comment reflects how this conspiratorial view of immigration spread in the Republican Party before this year’s by-election, referring to congressional control.

Facebook ads posted last year by MP Elise Stefanick’s election committee say Democrats want a “permanent election uprising” by granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. The plan would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

Alex DeGrass, a senior adviser to Stephanie’s campaign, said Monday that “she has never supported any racist positions or racist statements.” He criticized the “sad and misinformation” in his ads.

Stephanick is the third-ranked leader of the House Republican group to replace Congresswoman Liz Cheney, R. Vaio, who angered the party by denouncing Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Cheney, Monday on TwitterHe said the group’s leadership “allowed white nationalism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism.” History has taught us that what begins with words ends in worse. “

The rhetoric of replacement theory has also permeated major Republican campaigns.

“Democrats want open borders so they can bring in tens of millions of illegal aliens, and amnesty is their electoral strategy,” said Blake Masters, who is running for the Republican Senate in Arizona. Written on Twitter An hour after the Buffalo hunt. “Not on my watch.”

A spokesman for the Masters did not respond to a request for comment.

Jean-Pierre noted that the White House will speak more broadly about racism than assigning specific people to criticism.

“When you start calling people by name, you get past it,” he said.

Although Biden did not speak directly about the theory of substitution, his warnings about racism remain an element of his public speeches.

“I think we’re still fighting for the American spirit,” Biden said at a Democratic Party fundraising rally in Chicago three days before the shooting in Buffalo.

Biden said he has no plans to run for the 2020 presidential election – he has run out of two previous campaigns, served as vice president and then resigned when Hillary Clinton gained support for the race in 2016 – and he was happy to pass. . Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

But he said he was shocked “when these people came out of the plains of Charlottesville, Virginia, holding torches” and repeated “the same anti-Semitic bile that was sung everywhere from Nuremberg to Berlin in the first part of the 1930s. ” .

And he recalled how Trump answered questions about the demonstration, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, a young woman who was there to protest against whites.

“He said there were great people on both sides,” Biden said.

He added: “We’re not going to let that happen, guys.”

Johnson, president of the NAACP, said the country must “finally set the path so that we, as a nation, can deal with local terrorism as foreign terrorism, in the most aggressive way possible.”

He added that “white supremacy and democracy cannot coexist”.

Associated Press writer Karen Matthews contributed to this report in New York.