THE SLIGHT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAYTON GENDRON'S RADICALIZATION AND THE RADICALIZATION OF THE AVERAGE FOX VIEWER

I was able to download a copy of the manifesto posted by Payton Gendron, the eighteen-year-old who drove hours from a town near the New York-Pennsylvania border in order to commit mass murder at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo. I don't blame Tucker Carlson for what Gendron did. Gendron never mentions Carlson, and is explicit in the manifesto about how he was radicalized:

Where did you get your current beliefs? ...

Mostly from the internet.

... Was there a particular event or reason you decided to commit to a violent attack?

... I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid. I would normally browse /k/ because I’m a gun nut and /out/ because I love the outdoors and I eventually wound up on /pol/. There I learned through infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing Whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the Jews and the elite were behind this. From there, I also found other sites, like worldtruthvideos.website, dailyarchives.org, and dailystormer.cn where through data and exposure to real information I learned the truth. We are doomed by low birth rates and high rates of immigration. I never even saw this information until I found these sites, since mostly I would get my news from the front page of Reddit.

Gendron didn't get these ideas from binge-watching Fox News. He didn't get them from Republican politicians. Nevertheless, what fellow shitposters communicated to Gendron sounds an awful lot like what manistream Republicans are communicating to their base -- with one slight difference.

Don’t forget Blake masters. He published this tweet one hour ago. pic.twitter.com/ND7ePAmWa3

— Danny_Vandelay (@TequilaDanKC) May 15, 2022

The slight difference is that Stefanik, Masters, and the Fox commentators primarily stress political responses -- real Americans must prevent "amnesty" and keep voting Republican -- while Gendron calls for a violent response.

In Gendron's manifesto, he mentions elections, seizing on the (highly implausible) notion that immigration will flip Texas blue and thus lead to permanent Democratic dominance of the Electoral College -- an idea I suspect he picked up from fellow shitposters who do watch Fox. But Gendron is fatalistic about this. The endgame is race war.

Meanwhile the 10000 ton boulder of demographic change rolls ever forward, gaining momentum and possibly destroying all in its path. Eventually, when the White population of the USA realizes the truth of the situation, war will erupt. Soon the replacement of the whites within Texas will hit its apogee and with the non-white political and social control of Texas; and with this control, the electoral college will be heavily stacked in favor of a democratic victory so that every electoral cycle will be a certainty.

After an election cycle or two with certain Democratic victory, those remaining, non democratic voting, non brainwashed whites will see the future clear before them, and with this knowledge realize the impossibility of a diplomatic or political victory.

Within a short time regular and widespread political, social and racial violence will commence. In this tempest of conflict is where will be strike, a strong, unified, ethnically and culturally focused pro-white, pro-european group will be everything the average white family needs and long for. With these boosted numbers, and with our unified forces, complete control of the United States will be possible. Above all, be ready for violence, and when the time comes, strike hard and fast.

In the YouTube compilation above, it's fascinating how much Tucker Carlson stresses the idea that the thwarting the Democrats is the way to solve this problem. Some of the recent writing about Carlson argues that he's not an orthodox Republican. The compilation makes clear that in many ways he's just another GOP hack, because the endgame for him is GOP victory. Rants about "the Great Replacement" undoubtedly reflect his sincere and deep-seated racism, but he uses them primarily as a way of getting Republican voters to the polls.

The Fox News/mainstream GOP version of Great Replacement rhetoric is not quite what you get in the forums Payton Gendron frequented. But the biggest difference is that -- at least for now -- Fox and the GOP aren't calling for an open shooting war against the enemy. They're encouraging the same racist rage, but they're doing it for votes.