Nick Gillespie: Both a violent extremist like the gunman in buffalo and a talk show host like ducter carlton, are drawing on the same well. The central fear is that there are many people who are very worried about what the country will be if people who look like them don't dominate it numerically, aren't a default. That's the emotional wellspring of all this. And versions of replacement, whether the extreme version that you saw in the manifesto from the buffalo gunman or the sanded down version that still calls itself replacement theory,. They're all down stream of that fear, and they're all harnessing it in different ways. It's a powerful and potent idea, even
Over the weekend, an 18-year-old man livestreamed himself shooting 13 people and killing 10. Within hours it became clear that the shooter’s intent was to kill as many Black people as possible. The suspect wrote online that he was motivated by replacement theory — a racist idea that white people are deliberately being replaced by people of color in places like America and Europe.
What are the origins of this theory, and how has it become simultaneously more extreme and more mainstream?
Guest: Nicholas Confessore, a political and investigative reporter for The New York Times.
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