Payton Gendron & the Buffalo Massacre
Posted By Greg Johnson On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]Payton Gendron
2,120 words
On Saturday, May 14th, 2022, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white man concerned with “the Great Replacement” of whites by non-whites, went to a place frequented by non-whites and started shooting. At this time, ten people are dead, most of them black. You can read his Manifesto here. [2]
Before I go into my standard boilerplate article on such shooting sprees, I need to note several things.
The last such spree [3] on which I commented took place on October 9, 2019, in Germany, i.e., more than 2-and-a-half years ago. This is a positive sign. The vast majority of mass shootings that have taken place in the United States during that period have been committed by non-whites, and white mass shooters have not been motivated by fear of ethnic replacement.
I have read Gendron’s manifesto [2], and nothing about it seems obviously fake. I am convinced that he is exactly what he claims to be: a race-conscious white man who thought that he could stop the Great Replacement by killing mostly elderly black women [4] at a supermarket. The people who immediately started claiming that this operation is somehow a “false flag” or that Gendron is a “glowie” need to present evidence.
The person responsible for this attack is Payton Gendron. Not white people. Not White Nationalists. Not his gun. Not /pol/. Not memes. Not the ideas of “white genocide” or “the Great Replacement.” Not the First Amendment or the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
Payton Gendron has been arrested. He should be tried and punished, alone. We cannot allow censors and gun-grabbers to weaponize and politically exploit this terrible event. We cannot allow innocents to be targeted by yet another online lynch mob of hysterical Leftists. Gendron’s crime is bad enough. Creating a backlash that harms innocent people will only make it worse.
Advocates of censorship will argue that this crime took place because of freedom of speech and could have been prevented by more rigorous censorship. This is false. There is already massive censorship — mostly by private corporations, like Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook — of discussions of ideas like the Great Replacement, but that did not prevent Payton Gendron from becoming a mass shooter.
Censorship did not just fail to prevent Payton Gendron from becoming a mass shooter, it actually made his killing spree more likely. For more than a decade now, I have been arguing against mass shootings like this. Yet censorious tech giants like Amazon, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have deplatformed, shadowbanned, and googled me out of search results along with the worst advocates of violent accelerationism. I am certain that if we had genuine free speech online that my arguments in articles like “Against White Nationalist Terrorism [5]” and “Against Accelerationism [6],” along with other articles criticizing accelerationist spree killers [7], could have prevented some of these senseless tragedies. So if the advocates of censorship are looking for “root causes,” they need to start by looking in the mirror.
Advocates of gun control will also try to exploit this senseless tragedy for political gain: “If only we had more gun control, this crime would not have happened.” However, Gendron’s manifesto makes clear that he regarded New York State gun control laws as an advantage for his crime: “NY has cucked gun laws. Assault style weapons and high capacity magazines are illegal for civilians to own, thus lowering threats from law-abiding civilians” (Manifesto, p. 58). If New York had less restrictive gun laws, he might have reconsidered the whole thing.
For what it’s worth, the gun grabbers are actually part of Gendron’s plan: “Won’t your attack result in calls for the removal of gun rights in the United States? Yes, that is the plan all along” (Manifesto, p. 11). Like Tarrant, Gendron hopes to inspire the gun grabbers, thinking that will accelerate change by creating a violent backlash.
Deceptive people will argue that Gendron’s crimes were caused by the “conspiracy theory” of “the Great Replacement.” They’ll blame Renaud Camus for coining the term. They’ll blame Tucker Carlson for popularizing it. But their blame is misplaced. They’re not getting to the “root problem,” which is simply that the Great Replacement is real, and it will remain a real and growing problem, even if all discussion of it is censored. They’re just blaming the messenger. They’re blaming the bearer of bad news. But the whole reason we need freedom of speech [8] is so we can tell powerful people that their plans have gone wrong.
Gendron’s decision to go on a shooting spree was motivated by a false sense of urgency. On the one hand, he knew that the solution to our problems requires a “civilizational paradigm shift”: “We must inevitably correct the disaster of hedonistic, nihilistic individualism. But it will take some time, time we do not have due to the crisis of mass immigration” (Manifesto, p. 2). Actually, the passage I quoted is simply plagiarized from Brenton Tarrant’s Manifesto. Tarrant too was acting with a false sense of urgency, and not only did Gendron copy his idea, he copied his very words.
There are two problems with this reasoning. First, we have decades to get this right. Payton Gendron could have spent his entire life working to raise consciousness about white replacement. He didn’t have to waste his life this way. Second, as I make clear below, mass shootings are counter-productive anyway. As I never tire of repeating: We’ve got time to do this right, and if we don’t have time, doing something stupid won’t help us anyway.
And now for the boilerplate. The basic argument is always the same. I just need to change a few of the particulars.
As a white person, I look down upon the criminals among us. I do not reflexively defend and glorify them. This was a terrible act: immoral, illegal, and politically damaging to white interests. I hope Gendron receives a fair trial and — if found guilty — a just punishment, but that seems unlikely given the racially charged, anti-white atmosphere in America today.
We obviously don’t know all the facts yet, but based on Gendron’s livestream and manifesto, we can say several things with confidence.
First, Gendron was definitely concerned with white racial dispossession. We also cannot rule out that he was motivated by recent acts of anti-white terrorism, such as the Waukesha massacre of white children and elderly people [9] committed by a black with a long history of public anti-white statements, who was free to commit his crimes because of Soros-funded activists.
Second, this shooting spree could not have happened in a homogeneously white society. When different peoples are forced to live together in the same system, frictions are inevitable. These frictions give rise to misunderstandings, distrust, alienation, and long-simmering resentments, which flare up into hatred, violence, and social upheaval. Gendron’s actions are predictable consequences of multiculturalism. Sadly, we will only see more such violence until white nations regain their sanity and reverse multiculturalism.
The establishment wants you to believe that white separatism, preservationism, and nationalism are inherently violent ideas. The precise opposite is true. Multiculturalism is an inherently violent idea, because multiculturalism makes ethnic hatred and violence inevitable. Ethnonationalism is an ideology of peace and amity, because giving distinct peoples their own homelands removes one of the principal causes of hatred and violence.
Thus the New Right stands for the principle of racial divorce [10]. It is time for whites and non-whites to go our separate ways and pursue our own destinies. We stand for the creation of separate racially homogeneous societies, through the peaceful and humane process [11] of redrawing borders and shifting populations.
Third, we should resist dismissing Gendron with the all-too-easy claim that he was “crazy.” Yes, he did something evil and stupid. But his underlying motive — fear of white race replacement — is not irrational or insane; it is a healthy reaction to objective facts. All white people have innate ethnocentric tendencies, wired deep in our brains. We love our own and we fear strangers. As diversity increases, all of us will bear increased psychic costs, even those who pursue wealth and status by selling out their own people in favor of foreigners.
Gendron and people like him may be nothing more than canaries in a coal mine: the first to sense the presence of a threat to the survival of us all. Gendron may have just been abnormally sensitive to the terrible psychic consequences of losing control of our society to aliens: stress, alienation, anger, hatred, rage, etc. This heightened sensitivity might also go along with a whole suite of other abnormal traits. But we dismiss people like Gendron at our own risk. For in the end, all of us will feel the same effects — unless we heed the warning signs and turn back the rising tide of color.
Finally, Gendron’s “solution” to his rage and alienation — killing innocent people — just makes the racial situation worse rather than better. We will surely learn a lot more about his ideas and affiliations in the coming months. But based on what we know now, we can say that his actions certainly resemble those of racially-motivated spree killers like Brenton Tarrant [12] (whom he was obviously imitating), John Earnest [13], Robert Bowers [14], Dylann Roof [15], Anders Behring Breivik [16], Wade Michael Page [17], and Frazier Glenn Miller [18], all of whom are products of what I call “Old Right” thinking.
[19]Brenton Tarrant
By the “Old Right,” I mean classical Fascism and National Socialism (with which Gendron explicitly associates himself) and their contemporary imitators who believe that White Nationalism can be advanced through such means as one-party politics, terrorism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide.
Today’s Old Right scene is rife with fantasies of race war, lone-wolf attacks on non-whites, and heroic last stands that end in a hail of police bullets. Intelligent and honorable people have emerged from this milieu. But there have been more than a few spree-killers as well.
This kind of violence is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. It does nothing to advance our cause and much to set us back.
Given that reason, science, and history are all on our side, and the greatest apparatus of coercion and brainwashing in human history is on the enemy’s side, doesn’t it make sense to attack the enemy at his weakest point rather than at his strongest? This is why the North American New Right pursues White Nationalism through intellectual and cultural means: we critique the hegemony [20] of anti-white ideas and seek to establish a counter-hegemony of pro-white ideas.
Only a fool picks a battle he cannot win, and we cannot win with violence [21]. Fortunately, we don’t have to. The Left lost the Cold War but won the peace through the establishment of intellectual and cultural hegemony. We can beat them the same way.
Furthermore, the only form of violence that even has a chance to be productive in halting multiculturalism and non-white immigration would target the people responsible for these policies, not random innocents.
Moreover, killing innocent people — even if they are racial invaders — has entirely predictable results. First, such violence creates sympathy for the victims. (Even I feel sympathy for them, yet I would send them all to a black homeland tomorrow if I had the power.) Second, it plays into the establishment narrative of evil, crazy, intolerant whites whose freedom of speech and weapons must be taken away.
As I argue in my essay “Against White Nationalist Terrorism [5],” White Nationalists are making tremendous progress by means of propaganda. We are converting people to our worldview. The more people we convert, the sooner we regain control of our homelands. This is why our enemies are hell-bent on censoring and deplatforming us. They use every shooting spree like Tarrant’s or Gendron’s as a pretext to further clamp down on our freedom of speech, which restricts our ability to change minds and delays the implementation of sane, nationalist policies. And every day we are delayed is paid for in white lives.
Payton Gendron killed ten people in Buffalo, most of them black. But far more white people will die if his deeds lead to further erosions of freedom.
I wish I could erect a wall between myself and the kind of unstable, undisciplined people who go on killing sprees, but you can’t change the world from a bunker. Thus, responsible white advocates need to adopt the next best course of action: (1) we must be alert to the signs of mental instability and inclinations toward violence and rigorously screen out such people, (2) we need to draw clear, unambiguous intellectual lines between New Right and Old Right approaches [22], and (3) if anyone makes concrete threats of committing such acts in our circles, we need to be the ones to call the police. Our choice is to talk to the police before such attacks —or be grilled by them afterwards.
My goal is to persuade our people that White Nationalism is the solution to ethnic conflict, not the cause of it. Spree killers and the people who celebrate them are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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