When the Dead and Wounded Matter, and When They Don’t

Whether something is a national tragedy or not depends on the race of the victims and whether the race and political views of the perpetrator check the right combination of boxes.

St. Clair County State’s Attorney Office / New York City Police Department / Waukesha County Sheriff's Department

On Sunday, police officers responded to a confrontation between five people of Hispanic descent that escalated into a shootout that left two dead and three wounded at a crowded Texas flea market. In California, on the same day, a 68-year-old Asian man walked into a church and opened fire, killing one person and wounding five others.

You probably didn’t hear about either of these mass shootings because the suspects’ identities don’t fit the liberal establishment’s preferred profile: a white male with vaguely right-wing characteristics.

There’s little value in these deaths because, like the Mongol army that catapulted plague-infected cadavers into the besieged city of Caffa, liberals only care about corpses as far as they can throw them at their political opponents. The tragedy in Buffalo, New York, that also occurred over the weekend was instructive of their cynicism.

On Saturday, 18-year-old Peyton Gendron shot and killed ten people at a supermarket. Though the media has characterized him as simply a right-wing nut, his Reddit posts show that he was an advocate of masks and lockdowns, and he reportedly wore a hazmat suit to school for the first week of his senior year because he was worried about catching Covid. The New York State Police had also investigated Gendron for threatening to shoot his classmates last year and he was referred for psychiatric evaluation and counseling. The FBI was presumably too preoccupied with targeting parents who protested schools’ Covid policies to focus on loons like Gendron.

But before the blood in the bodies of his victims had even gone cold, liberals tried to turn his rambling manifesto into a cudgel with which to bash the heads of their enemies. 

Gendron had mentioned the “replacement theory” in his manifesto, the basic claim of which is that white people are becoming a minority in the United States. So a story that raises questions about law enforcement and mental illness was spun by liberals into a tale about how the rhetoric of their conservative opponents unleashed this shooting spree.

“The normalization of racist politics is literally killing people in this country,” tweeted Ben Rhodes, a former advisor to President Barack Obama. Andrew Lawrence, a senior researcher at Media Matters, blamed Fox News host Tucker Carlson for Gendron’s actions and called for him to be taken off the air. Writing in Rolling Stone, Talia Lavin argued that Gendron was not a lone wolf killer but representative of the Republican Party “mainstream.”

The problem with all this, however, is that liberals actually agree with Gendron on demographic change.

In 2009, Rhodes’ boss was the subject of a cover article in The Atlantic titled, “The End of White America?”, which suggested that “the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability.” Politico published a story in 2013 about how the Democratic Party views the demographics of immigration and the politics of amnesty as an avenue for electoral victories and to “cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.” Two years later, then-Vice President Joe Biden said that it was “a source of our strength” that immigration would reduce Americans of “white European stock” to a minority.