Extreme right-wing ideologies are becoming an increasingly big problem for the US

Online extremism is nothing new, but who calls it out is becoming contentious, writes Holly Baxter

Latisha (right), a clerk at Tops market who called 911 when when a gunman opened fire at the store, is consoled during services at True Bethel Baptist Church (Getty)

What makes a terrorist a terrorist? That was the question this week after a shooter entered a grocery store in Buffalo, NY on Saturday and killed 10 people (and seriously injured two others). Eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron live-streamed his attack on the Amazon-owned streamer site Twitch, travelling a reported three hours to a supermarket he knew catered to mostly Black clientele. Early reports indicate that all the people who died were Black. As always with such tragedies, the stories have come pouring in, heartbreaking in their mundanity: a grandmother shot while picking up a cake for her grandson’s birthday party; a hero security guard killed while trying to protect others; a kindly taxi driver and a substitute teacher gunned down while doing their weekly shop.

Gendron appears to have published a white supremacist manifesto online, and his ideology is plain to see. He details his belief in the “great replacement” theory, often alluded to by far-right figures, some Fox News commentators, and members of the Republican Party. This conspiracy theory – which posits that white people in western countries will soon be “replaced” by Black and brown immigrants who are asked or paid to move by nefarious left-wing figures, including Democrats – is popular on unmoderated message boards such as 4chan and 8chan. But it’s also mainstream enough that elected GOP politicians openly, and casually, mention it.

It seems clear that the Buffalo shooting was a hate crime and an act of terrorism. It’s also clear that extreme right-wing ideologies are becoming an increasingly big problem for the US, and indeed for the west. The US is a highly conservative country that has always had its fair share of far-right extremists, including the Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people (including 19 children at a daycare centre) in 1995. McVeigh and Nichols were paranoid, libertarian right-wingers who feared that the government wanted to control private citizens.