White Supremacy E-Book

Gavin Evans

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 240

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Buffalo, New York, 2022. Ten black people murdered. The killer, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, says he was driven by 'Great Replacement' - the conspiracy theory that a Jewish-led elite is replacing white people with black and brown people. This, and a spate of similar hate crimes, begs the question: what are the origins of such behaviour? Gavin Evans traces the historical roots of white supremacy. He begins in the 19th century with Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton's race-based theories before looking at the spread of eugenics ideas throughout the UK, Europe and the United States, their Holocaust-prompted decline after the Second World War, and their revival in a different guise through the promotion of race science from the late 20th century. Evans also examines the hatching of 'Great Replacement' conspiratorial ideas in the 21st century - and their expression via alt-right forums to the minds of troubled young men with access to assault rifles. White Supremacy breaks new ground in showing the links between mainstream 'Replacement Theory' and the terrorist version cited by far-right killers. It also traces the thread between these ideas and the race science promoted both by the far right and establishment figures. It looks at what these ideas have in common with those promoted by, for example, the founder of eugenics.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-191556-304-0

ebook ISBN: 978-191556-305-7

Text copyright © 2024 Gavin Evans

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Bell MT by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India.

Printed and bound in Malta by Melita Press

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1A Boy with Bad Ideas and a Gun

CHAPTER 2Eugenics and the Origins of ‘White Genocide’

CHAPTER 3How Eugenics Conquered the United States

CHAPTER 4‘Racial Hygiene’ and Nazi Eugenics

CHAPTER 5The Revival of Race Science

CHAPTER 6The Identitarians of Europe and the Great Replacement

CHAPTER 7The South African Connection

CHAPTER 8The Rise of the Alt-right

CHAPTER 9Eight Killers, 202 Bodies

CHAPTER 10Racism in the 21st Century

Postscript

Selected References

PREFACE

We seldom remember those who are killed, especially if they die in large numbers at the hands of a lone shooter. Instead our attention is invariably on the one who pulled the trigger to end their lives. What made him do it (and, always, it is him not her)? How did he get his guns? Where did he find his ideas?

When Payton Gendron murdered ten black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on 14 May 2022, I followed the story with a mixture of anger and despair. It soon became clear that he’d immersed himself in the scientific racism and replacement theory that I had spent the last two decades trying to combat, and that these pseudo-scientific ideas were a large part of the motivation he gave for his action.

I started writing on the fallacies of race science more than twenty years ago. My first piece was a comment feature in the Guardian on Richard Lynn, the University of Ulster evolutionary psychologist who had no qualms about calling himself a racist and vigorously promoted faux-scientific racism and eugenics for many decades. Later I wrote extensively about Lynn, his friend and colleague J. Philippe Rushton, and other scientific racism advocates like Tatu Vanhanen and Jared Taylor in two books on the subject.

Along the way I joined the Royal Institution’s Challenging Pseudoscience group, lectured, delivered speeches and was interviewed regularly on this subject. My concern was that this form of pseudoscience was filtering into the mainstream, punted by non-scientists who were part of the cultural establishment; people like the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, the podcaster Sam Harris, the YouTuber Jordan Peterson and the journalist Andrew Sullivan. It also often appeared in mainstream publications and sites ranging from The Spectator and Quillette to TheJoe Rogan Experience,as well as being trumpeted by mainstream politicians including Donald Trump.

What I hadn’t yet clocked until the Buffalo massacre was that this kind of material was also having a direct influence on far-right killers. Soon after, I contacted Joe Mulhall, senior researcher from the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate, asking if he had a copy of the eighteen-year-old killer’s full, 180-page manifesto, which had been removed from the web. When it arrived in my email box later that day I read it carefully, and found that Gendron was citing, quoting from and recommending papers by Lynn, Rushton, Vanhanen, Taylor and various other race science promoters I’d discussed in my books and articles.

It was then that I decided to write this book. I began my research by reading the manifestos and web rants of other far-right killers, and it became clear they were influencing each other and drawing from the same source material – a poisonous blend of faux-scientific racism and naked racism, as well as Nazi and other anti-Semitic ideas they found on message board sites like 4chan – and that their embrace of race science was not a peripheral part of their motivation. It was a central driving force for their killing sprees. Each of their manifestos, as well as their other writing, stressed that their mission was to protect the superior white ‘race’, which was being ‘replaced’ by black people, brown people or Muslim people. Some referred directly to this as the Great Replacement and also used the term White Genocide. According to several of the authors, those behind this replacing, the puppeteers pulling the strings, were the Jewish elite.

Just as race science had its conventional version, so too did its replacement theory offshoot. It was promoted with vigour in forums that were a long way from the fringe, particularly on US news channel Fox – for instance, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and by several prominent Republication politicians including Trump. Just as race science often started with the apparently more palatable claim that Ashkenazi Jewish people were innately smarter than everyone else, so mainstream proponents of replacement theory found ways to soften their message, claiming that those behind this conspiracy were the Democrats and liberal elite (rather than Jews) and those replaced were ‘legacy’ or ‘traditional classic’ Americans (rather than whites).

I grew up mainly in apartheid South Africa, where the relation between words and their frequently fatal consequences was never in doubt. It was a country where the rhyme ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me’ made no sense. There, words and broken bones were bound up together.

And now I was seeing it again – how pseudo-scientific ideas about race and the Great Replacement were having a profound impact on men, mainly young men, who absorbed them on websites like 4chan, 8chan and Gab and then bought semi-automatic assault rifles. Part of my research took me deep into those ‘chans’ and after a week of immersion I would need at least a week to recover, so vile was the material I encountered there. Much of it was informed by a faux-scientific brand of racism that maintained black people were innately less intelligent than white and Asian people. Those behind these ideas presented themselves as ‘race realists’ and labelled their views under the apparently innocuous label ‘human biodiversity’.

Race science emerged in full-blown form in the second half of the 19th century. Charles Darwin was one of many prominent figures of his time who vigorously promoted the idea of innate white superiority and innate black inferiority. His cousin, Francis Galton, took this further, coming up with the concept of eugenics that involved encouraging well-to-do white people to have more children and introducing coercive methods to eliminate ‘feeble-mindedness’ within the white population and protect it from being sullied by other, supposedly inferior races. Black people generally, and Australian Aboriginals in particular, were seen as belonging at the simian bottom. But was there a link between these ideas and the Great Replacement theories of a century later?

From the time of the First World War, Francis Galton’s followers began warning about the threat of the white race being overwhelmed through immigration and interbreeding with ‘inferior’ races. This was captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, which gives the replacement words to the villain Tom Buchanan: ‘If we don’t look out the white race will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved’.

White Supremacy draws the links from Galton to Gendron via Gatsby. At first it seemed to make sense to begin with one of these far-right killers and then trace the connections between his ideas and those that preceded them, but when I immersed myself in each of the stories of these mass murderers it became clear that it would be wrong to give the attention-seeking killers centre-stage once again.

The post-2010 alt-right killings I focus on in this book left 226 people dead and 497 injured, many seriously. These are just numbers and we tend not to think beyond them – those who are killed are seldom those we recall. Only one, the British MP Jo Cox, is better-known than her killer, and that’s because she was a prominent politician and we sense the huge loss caused by her death. Yet each of these 226 deaths is a tragedy for those left behind – parents, children, siblings, spouses, lovers, friends – and frequently for their communities too.

And behind those deaths is the history of bad ideas I focus on in this book, starting with those held by a young killer of black people.

CHAPTER 1

A Boy with Bad Ideas and a Gun

2.30pm, Tops Friendly Market, 14 May 2022, Buffalo, New York

Aaron Salter Jr was a man of ideas. This 55-year-old father of three had set up his own green energy company with the aim of running engines on water by separating the hydrogen from the oxygen – a project he returned to when not busy fixing up cars and motorbikes, inventing handy gadgets or completing his bachelor’s degree.

For Aaron, Tops was a home away from home, his mother having worked there for fifteen years of his childhood. His work as security guard was more than just a job. He went out of his way to help customers in little ways and to laugh and joke with them. But his background of three decades as a police officer and three years at this supermarket on the rough east side of town taught him to be alert at all times, even when smiling.

On this spring afternoon he was walking through the parking lot with a woman who needed help – the kind of request he often answered – when he saw something that alarmed him. A man wearing a military helmet topped by a head-mounted camera and heavy, camouflage body armour strode towards the entrance, stopped, raised an assault rifle and started firing at people in the parking lot. Aaron saw four people falling, including a young woman and a man he recognised, Heyward Patterson, who was helping to lift another customer’s groceries into a car, a charitable public service he routinely provided.

Aaron acted quickly, ushering the woman he’d helped and others inside, telling them to hide. He turned to face the shooter and fired at him, but the bullet bounced off the body armour. Some years earlier, in his days as a police lieutenant, Aaron had a shotgun pointed at his face, but on that fraught occasion his police partner shot first, downing the assailant. This time no-one else was at hand. The shooter aimed, fired and Aaron fell. Dead.

Some customers and employees hid in the store’s break room and barricaded the door with a desk. Others cowered in the milk cooler. Inside, an assistant manager called 911 and whispered what was happening, but the despatcher was irritated and told her to stop whispering before hanging up. The shooter, shouting ‘nigger-nigger-nigger!’, aimed his rifle at the person behind the counter before realising she was white. He apologised, then noticed the people hiding in the milk cooler and fired at them, but their lives were saved by the milk cartons.

Others could not escape the sixty rounds he fired. Aside from Aaron and the 67-year-old church deacon Heyward Patterson, the dead included: Pearl Young, a 77-year-old grandmother and substitute teacher, who helped run her church’s soup kitchen and would hand out food to the homeless in the park. She was buying a few items for dinner.

Roberta Drury, 32, was buying food for dinner with her brother who was recovering from leukaemia. She’d moved to Buffalo to care for him and was the first person killed in the parking lot.

Celestine Chaney, a 65-year-old grandmother who’d survived breast cancer and three brain aneurysms. She went to Tops with her sister to buy strawberries to make shortcake. Her sister made it to the milk cooler, but Celestine, who had mobility issues, didn’t.

Ruth Whitfield, 86, a grandmother of eight, stopped at Tops to buy groceries after her daily visit to a nursing home to see her husband.

Andre Mackniel, 53, a father of six, was buying a birthday cake for his three-year-old son.

Geraldine Talley, 62, was buying food for a picnic with her fiancé, who only escaped because he happened to be in another aisle of the store.

Magnus Morrison, 52, went to buy a chicken dinner to share with his girlfriend.

Katherine Massey, 72, a community and civil rights activist and campaigner for tighter gun control laws, was grocery shopping for her sister.

Three more were shot but survived. All ten who died were black.

At 3.36 the shooter left the store and started walking back to his car, where he had two more weapons and ammunition, with the idea of driving off to continue shooting black people. But by then the police had arrived and cornered him. He put his gun to his neck before the officers talked him down. In the end, for this killer of ten, the prospect of eventually dying in jail was more appealing than instant death.

When police examined the assault rifle, and also the shotgun and hunting rifle in the car, they got a sense of what they were dealing with. Each of these weapons was daubed with writing. Among the words were ‘nigger’, ‘here’s your reparations!’, ‘White Lives Matter’, ‘Stand up and be counted’ and the names Brenton Tarrant, Dylann Roof, Robert Powers and John Earnest – previous white supremacist mass killers. Other letters and numbers included ‘SYGAOWN’ (Stop Your Genocide Against Our White Nations) and various Aryan and Nazi symbols, along with several numbers of significance to the alt-right including 2083 (a reference to the title of the manifesto of yet another white supremacist killer, Anders Breivik).

The 18-year-old shooter, Payton Gendron, live-streamed his attack. Half an hour before the shooting he had invited a group of six, including a retired federal agent, to his Discord chatroom, telling them what to expect. No-one warned the authorities – not then, nor when watching the killings. He also livestreamed it on another site, Twitch, starting as he approached Tops, with these words: ‘Just got to go for it!’ Twitch shut it down after two minutes but, through file sharing, more than three million people watched the event on another site, Streamable, before it was removed.

Gendron’s father gave him the hunting rifle for his 16th birthday. Then, after turning 18, he walked into Vintage Firearms in Endicott, New York, to buy a Bushmaster high-powered semi-automatic rifle. Under US Federal Law he filled in Form 4473 and the store’s 75-year-old owner Robert Donald did the required background check. There were no ‘red flags’, which in New York State would have come up if the police had decided he was unfit to buy weapons. He also bought body armour, a military helmet and spent $60 on equipment to modify the Bushmaster so that it could hold magazines capable of firing 30 rounds, using his father’s power drill to transform it into a military-style weapon. It emerged from his 673-page online diary that he raised money for all these purchases by buying and selling silver coins.

A few months earlier the police had investigated the then-17-year-old Gendron. When a teacher asked students what they planned to do after graduation, he nonchalantly replied: ‘murder-suicide’. He was detained for 36 hours in a mental hospital for evaluation but persuaded the doctors and cops that he was joking. His background check delivered an all-clear, meaning he was viewed as safe to own guns.

He wrote on the online messaging board 4chan in November 2021 that a ‘brenton tarrant event will happen soon’, a reference to the Australian killer of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Over the next six months he posted updates on preparations, equipment and his plan to take action. He asked for and was given advice on details like the best body armour and helmets and included pictures of the modification to his assault rifle, but none of this was picked up by the FBI or reported to the police. Nor did the authorities get tipped off about the pre-shooting release of his 180-page manifesto, which borrows heavily from other white supremacist killers, especially Tarrant, and includes his claim that the purpose of the attack was to ‘terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country’. However, he redacted the entry for Tops ‘because I’d prefer that the FBI and local police don’t know until the attack has started’, although he did mention killing people in a store in Buffalo.

In January 2022 Gendron said he ‘got serious’ and began planning, choosing 15 March as his ‘due date’ because it was the anniversary of Tarrant’s mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand. He considered attacking a synagogue because he believed Jews were the masterminds behind the Great Replacement of white people, but 15 March was not a Saturday so he instead decided to kill black people and began researching locations, including schools, malls, churches and a Walmart in Rochester, New York. Eventually he settled on Tops in Buffalo because it was a mainly black area, and in early March he drove 200 miles to carry out reconnaissance. But his plans were delayed by a bout of Covid. He drove again to Tops on 13 May and carried out the massacre the next day.

He said he aimed to prompt a fascist revolution to drive black, brown and Jewish people out of the United States and wrote in his manifesto that he hoped to survive so he could ‘see how the world plays out after all’. He added: ‘If I became old in the same prison I would only assume that we have passed the point of no return and will die out, and that I have failed. If we do rise up against the replacers, I expect that I will be let out and honoured amongst my people.’

Who is Payton Gendron?

So how did this 18-year-old get to be a mass killer of black people? There are three possible major contributing factors: his own mental issues, the gun culture and lax firearm controls in the US, and the content on 4chan and other alt-right sites that absorbed his attention.

It is worth starting with his volatile state of mind because ‘mental health’ is routinely raised by the gun lobby as the reason for these killings – a convenient explanation because all mass killers have issues of this kind. How could it be otherwise? The problem with this as a cover-all explanation is that there are millions of young men with troubled minds who don’t buy assault rifles to kill people whose colour or religion or ethnicity they despise. For that, specific prompts are needed – the opportunity to purchase guns and an online culture that grooms young white men by directing them towards the extreme right, and towards the idea that black people, brown people, Muslim people and Jewish people threaten their futures.

But to begin with the mind of this killer, interviews with former classmates produce a mixed picture – inevitably, because no-one behaves entirely consistently. He grew up in a middle-class family, the son of Paul and Pamela, both civil engineers, his father a Democrat and trade unionist, his mother a Republican, in the little town of Conklin, population 5,000, in New York State. Their light blue two-storey house with its black shutters and well-tended garden does not look like the home of a Nazi-backing murderer. The photographs he includes in his manifesto show a chunky, bespectacled lad with longish blond-dyed hair and a scraggly beard, though by the time of the killing the dye had been washed out. One schoolmate said she’d seen him playing backyard basketball with his two brothers. Another said he was ‘sweet and kind’ and talked to her about getting a good engineering career.

But most paint a different picture – that he was a ‘loner’, a ‘bit of an outcast’, a ‘gun lover’, one who was ‘book smart’ but kept to himself, somebody who would eat alone at school and not turn up to class and grew ever-more reclusive. His own version from his online diary is inconsistent. There is much bravado about how he duped the police, teachers and his parents and also much pomposity about being a man in the know. But a sense of vulnerability and despair is pervasive. In one entry from shortly before the killings, he describes his social isolation: ‘I would like to say I had quite a normal childhood … but that is not the case.’ He continues: ‘It’s not that I actually dislike other people, it’s just that they make me feel so uncomfortable. I’ve actually spent years of my life being online. And to be honest I regret it. I didn’t go to friend’s houses often or go to any parties whatsoever. Every day after school I would just go home and play games and watch YouTube, mostly by my self.’ Later he adds: ‘If I could go back maybe I’d tell myself to get the fuck off 4chan … and to get an actual life.’ He says his time in the hospital on May 2021, following his murder-suicide threat, was a harrowing experience and that it was after this that he decided to kill people.

Even his accounts of his political attitudes before he discovered the alt-right don’t match. In his manifesto he writes, perhaps ironically, that he was ‘deep into communist ideology’ from the age of twelve until fifteen. But in his diary he mentions tensions with black students in the sixth grade and being suspended from school for a day after being accused of calling a black student the n-word. His behaviour became increasingly bizarre. When schooling resumed after the Covid lockdown he arrived with a full hazmat suit, a protest against wearing a mask. That was followed by the murder-suicide threat. After graduating he registered at a community college to study engineering but dropped out while telling his parents he was attending classes. Six weeks before the shooting he attacked a cat that was fighting with his own cat, stabbing it repeatedly with a knife. He smashed its head on a concrete slab and chopped off its head with a hatchet. He posted the picture of the decapitated cat online. ‘Honestly, right now I don’t feel anything about killing that cat,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I thought I would be in pain but I literally just feel blank.’ In his manifesto he insists he is ‘perfectly sane’.

Gendron, his manifesto and 4chan

Gendron’s state of mind, his influences and worldview can be gleaned from his verbose 180-page manifesto and his online diary. More than half is borrowed from other killers, especially Tarrant. It includes the same themes – fears about the mass immigration of non-white people as part of a conspiracy to replace white people (i.e. the Great Replacement) and the view that this is orchestrated behind the scenes by Jews who secretly control the world. The result, unless it is fought, will be ‘White Genocide’, he writes. This is his main theme – in fact his opening pages are devoted solely to this replacement/genocide idea.

In a long Q&A with himself, and elsewhere in the document, he argues that low white birthrates, high black and brown birthrates and rampant immigration were a ‘crisis’ for the white people and an ‘assault’ on the race that ‘will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement for the European people’. His aim is to ‘spread awareness to my fellow Whites about the real problems the West is facing, and to encourage further attacks that will eventually start the war that will save the Western world, save the White race and allow for humanity to progress into more advanced civilizations’. Several of those he cites are on the extremist end of the race science spectrum, including Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist site American Renaissance, which claims that whites and East Asians are innately more intelligent than black people. Another is the late J. Philippe Rushton, one of the premier academic promoters of scientific racism before his death in 2012. Then there’s the evolutionary psychologist Richard Lynn, who died in 2023 at the age of 93 and had called himself a ‘racist’, ‘racialist’ and ‘scientific racist’, and Lynn’s Finnish collaborator Tatu Vanhanen.

His manifesto suggests that men with more mainstream reputations were being used as ballast to back up the arguments of the extreme right. One he cites approvingly as being in support of his race science views is Ron Unz, a former Republican Party candidate and founder of the right-wing, race-science-backing website The Unz Review. Others include Thomas Bouchard, a twins studies researcher whose work was financed by the overtly racist Pioneer Fund, and also the psychologist Robert Plomin, who, like Bouchard, put his name to a document backing the idea that different racial IQ averages were prompted by genetics. Then there’s Breitbart, a platform of what is sometimes termed the ‘alt-light’ (the less overtly fascist wing of the alt-right). Gendron also drew from the writing of several other race science promoters including Michael Woodley, a British plant ecologist who sidelines in race science and is sponsored by Unz, writing about a relationship between ethnicity and innate cognitive ability and espousing the discredited view that humans, like animals, can be divided into sub-species. Like Woodley, Gendron says blacks are a ‘different subspecies of human’. One difference, he claims, is brain size, ‘most notably in the prefrontal cortex’ – a 19th-century view with no scientific backing.

Gendron misinterpreted other papers, including a 1998 study he says provided proof of a gene variant linked to high IQ in Europeans, when in fact the relevant allele (gene variation) was said to be linked to low IQ. He cites blogs from ‘human biodiversity’ promoters who failed to understand genome-side association studies (GWAS), making claims about race and intelligence that are refuted by the original papers. The manifesto includes graphics illustrating Gendron’s claim about differences in IQ distribution that he explains in terms of differences in brain genetics, claiming blacks are ‘more prone to psychopathy and less capable of empathy than Whites’ and that they have less innate moral understanding. He concludes this section with three sentences that sum up the basic premise of race science: ‘Blacks on average have a lesser IQ due to restrictions of their brain development. They are prone to violence and common criminal activity. We must remove blacks from our Western civilizations.’

He says he was not born or raised a racist but became one after he ‘learnt the truth’, when he began browsing on 4chan in May 2020. This is typical of 4channers, who talk of their ‘red pill’ moments when they learnt the truth hidden from the ‘normies’. Gendron became obsessed with 4chan because of ‘extreme boredom’ induced by Covid. Soon he found 4chan’s ‘politically correct’ tab, more commonly known as /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.’ He writes that the person most responsible for his radicalisation was the Christchurch killer, Brenton Tarrant, whose mosque massacre livestream he found, along with Tarrant’s manifesto, via 4chan. ‘Brenton started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our White lands, without this livestream I would likely have no idea about the real problems the West is facing.’ He said he realised that he would no longer ‘accept our genocide’ and that he would ‘have to take the fight to the replacers myself’.

From 4chan he found his way to the even more rabid 8chan and to several other alt-right sites including dailystormer.cn, which is run by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who vigorously promotes race science, anti-Semitism and violent misogyny. Gendron calls himself a neo-Nazi, fascist, racist, anti-Semite, bigot, ethno-nationalist and a white supremacist. He dips into neo-Nazi terminology – for example, referring to the US government as the ‘zog-bot government’ – and devotes 32 pages to his views on Jews, including scores of pages containing anti-Semitic memes, cartoons, infographics and other bits and pieces from 4chan via Nazi Germany. He repeats the classic tropes of anti-Semitism and concludes that Jews are ‘the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them.’