Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As you surely know by now, on Saturday afternoon, a gunman shot 13 people at a supermarket in East Buffalo killing 10 people in what is allegedly a racially motivated attack. All the two of the victims were Black. The murder rampage brings to mind many like it in recent years, the nine Black church-goers who were killed in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. The 11 people killed in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, in 2018, the 20 people who are killed at a Walmart in El Paso, 2019, by a gunman who had publicly expressed hatred of Latinos, and the Christchurch, New Zealand massacre, 51 people killed at two mosques in an attack, though outside this county, being cited as an inspiration to the Buffalo gunman.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there have been 333 right-wing extremist-related killings in the US from 2012 through 2021. That doesn't include this attack, of course, and three out of four of those killings were committed by white supremacists. Joining me now to discuss the racist white supremacist domestic terrorism context of the Buffalo massacre is Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter and spokesperson with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. Michael, thanks very much for joining us today on this grim occasion. Welcome to WNYC.

Michael Edison Hayden: Thanks so much, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The gunman allegedly published a document online prior to the attack that parrots a racist conspiracy theory referred to as the great replacement. Now, I want to mention that NPR reports that the conspiracy theory has moved from the far-right fringes to more mainstream politics in recent years. Is that your observation or intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Michael Edison Hayden: Yes. It's been really upsetting to watch over the last three, four years the degree to which something that we have first observed as a much more fringe phenomenon start appearing on Fox News. Once it hits that level of saturation, it becomes very difficult to contain it. It's a real problem. As you can see, there's a lot of people calling for Fox to do something about Tucker Carlson. He's obviously the biggest promoter of this, but also Republican politicians have been promoting it as well, which makes it really difficult. It makes it difficult also because we strive to be non-partisan and then you have one party who is consistently hitting on this white supremacist conspiracy theory.

Brian Lehrer: NPR has also decided not to refer to the gunman's 180-page document as a manifesto, which a lot of other media are, arguing that using that term might be heard as a call to action for other white supremacists who might commit copycat attacks. I'm curious if you have an opinion about that term at the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Michael Edison Hayden: It seems like people just started calling these documents manifestos, which gives them an air of importance. I'm going to use a radio safe language, but to say this is just a piece of garbage. This is a racist screed

Brian Lehrer: It's a rant.

Michael Edison Hayden: Yes. It's a racist screed written by an extremely disturbed person who is consumed with resentment, and there's nothing interesting about it other than the fact that it represents a glimpse as to what this propaganda is doing to people's minds. If manifesto gives it any whiff of importance, yes, I agree with scrapping the term. We're trying to dial it back, but the only problem is that you have to find language that people understand exactly what you're talking about. People are still calling it a manifesto.

Brian Lehrer: I see that according to your group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 733 hate groups currently operating in the US, 35 of which operate in New York State. Can you talk a bit about some of those groups? How many are white supremacists explicitly or are they concentrated in one part of New York State or another? We know from the reporting that this 18-year-old had to travel from his home in Conklin, New York, 200 miles from Buffalo in order to target this particular predominantly Black community in East Buffalo.

Michael Edison Hayden: Well, I just want to focus on one in particular, which is Patriot Front, because of the hate groups that we list For 2022, Patriot Front is the most relevant to this discussion around the Buffalo shooter. They are very much hooked into the great replacement white genocide rhetoric. There are members of Patriot Front basically all over the country, but there are quite a few in New York. We've seen Patriot Front and stuff everywhere from Brooklyn to Upstate New York.

We've seen Patriot Front, an example of some of the stuff they've done, they did deface an Arthur Ash Memorial or they were responsible in Brooklyn for defacing the George Floyd Memorial. You may remember that happened maybe it was a summer, last summer. They've been working on these, I guess you'd call it organized vandalism projects, where they just go around looking for things that are lifting up LGBTQ rights or lifting up civil rights topics and defacing them.

Brian Lehrer: Do you see any relationship between a group like that and the topic of our previous segment, people running in local school board elections in New York State and around the country on culture wars platforms? I don't want to attribute white supremacism to people who are running on things that might be more subtle than that, but how much do you think, if at all, that this infiltrates that?

Michael Edison Hayden: Well, it's a complicated topic, but the short of it is that there is a tremendous amount of fear and resentment in this country and it's very easy for people who are clued into these feelings of fear or resentment to exploit in order to try to take it towards education and towards children. It's effective politics in many ways because it gets to the heart of the family. Whether white supremacists are involved in some of this, we've had a few instances in which white supremacists have appeared at school board meetings around the country and things like that, but it is part and parcel of the current Republican Party and what they stand for.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody's listening right now in Buffalo. I'm sure we have people with ties to Buffalo. If you want to call in and just say anything you want, there's so much grief over this and there's so much trauma mixed with the grief when people know that this kind of thing can happen to you, especially if you're a member of a certain community or certain various communities at any time just based on who you are.

Anybody wants to call in on any of these things, feel free. Also, the lay of the land of white supremacist, domestic terrorism in the United States right now as the main source of the domestic terror threat according to the FBI, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Michael Edison Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence unit. 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Do we know if the shooter has an official affiliation with any white supremacist group?

Michael Edison Hayden: He doesn't need one, and that's part of the problem of what we're dealing with right now. You're looking at a situation in which people who are isolated and fixated on fringe websites and forums or the messaging app Telegram, they don't need to belong to a particular group in order to stage a terror attack like this. Someone like the killer, or the alleged killer, is often in dialogue with someone they perceive to be exactly like themselves. They're just talking to someone who they hope it could be like themselves.

In this document that he published, the apparent document, I should say, because we need confirmation, but the apparent document that he published is filled with all these memes and references. This is a person trying to reach somebody who is taking in the very same propaganda on fringe websites. As he is taking in, he's imagining himself reading this document as he read the document, presumably, published by the Christchurch killer in March of 2019.

This mimetic approach to staging terror attacks functions in the way a group would, but we're dealing with people who are isolated, so you can imagine a prison cell, let's say, with a bunch of white supremacists. Let's say they're all in solitary confinement and communicating through the walls by tapping or something like that, that is the nature of this kind of group. It is a group of people who don't necessarily see one another.

Brian Lehrer: Donald in LA grew up in Buffalo. You're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hello.

Donald: Good morning, Brian. Thank you so much for having me on this tough conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Sure. What have you got for us?

Donald: Well, I'm calling because I grew up in Buffalo. I live in Los Angeles now, and I'm an author and a researcher in this area. I just wanted to call and share. I think we're minimizing the psychology of the depths of white supremacy right now. Many people believe that as we age as a society, we're going to lose this racism, but I think this young man being 18 years old is a wake-up call. White people are very fearful.

He spoke about the white replacement theory which came out of France many years ago, and it's this construct where we see the color of the nation changing and [unintelligible 00:11:50] giving us that information, but we're not paying attention to the fact that this is a deliberate effort throughout America to whitewash, literally, history and make white people feel as though they're under attack and they're losing something. We have to begin having more open and honest conversations about the intergenerational nature of white supremacy, and that when we talk about it, white supremacists have this language, but we have to talk about white superiority ideology in which everybody is not going to look like a white supremacist.

What you spoke about earlier with your earlier guest about the school board, this is all an effort to keep a particular visual out front so that we can continue this ideology. We're going to continue to grow these homegrown terrorists if we don't address this head-on.

Brian Lehrer: Donald, thank you very much. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Michael, do you have a generational analysis? It is striking that the shooter is 18 years old, and the caller suggests it's an indication of regeneration of white supremacist attitudes, even though we might like to hope that they're dying out as time goes on, as we get further away from enslavement in the United States, as we get further away from Jim Crow in the United States, et cetera.

With the changing of the population, it's being passed from generation to generation and even maybe growing among younger generations more than older generations among certain parts of wide America even more than it was there before. Do you have a generational analysis at the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Michael Edison Hayden: Certainly, the nature of the threat of white supremacist terrorism has evolved from, say, the Oklahoma City bombing until today. This is a very different era in many ways because of the internet. What the caller talks about though calls to mind something [unintelligible 00:14:05] if we can mention something positive. I think it is important if we were to do something positive about this is to start focusing on prevention, possibly from the state or federal level, to find out who may be in a position where they're vulnerable to this type of propaganda.

I agree that, yes, this is happening and there is a tremendous amount of resentment and fear out there. This is not necessarily true of every white kid in the United States right now, and it's important, particularly for young people, that we are taking the time to try to find out who might be susceptible to this sort of thing and taking out a compassionate approach to reaching people before it becomes too late.

That being said, yes, it is absolutely being passed down from generation and the resentment is growing. People see things like the way you turn on a sporting event, for example, and there's Black Lives Matter and things like that, there are people who are immediately ready to pick that up and exploit it and try to target these feelings of fear and resentment in the culture and create a narrative to suggest that white people are being targeted with hate and other things that are not necessarily happening in that case.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton, WNJP 88.5, Sussex, WNJY 89.3, Netcong, and WNJO 90.3, Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. A few more minutes with Michael Edison Hayden from the Intelligence Unit of the Southern Poverty Law Center as we put the Buffalo massacre in the context of white supremacists and other far-right extremist terrorism as the main domestic terrorism threat according to the FBI. Cassandra in the NYU area, you're on WNYC. Hello, Cassandra.

Cassandra: Hi. Good morning, everybody. I just wanted to piggyback a little bit off what Donald said and just to speak to Michael a little bit about how the Southern Poverty Law Center is looking at all this as well. I know you guys probably need a lot of support in order to really reach where we can start to dismantle this idea that some segments of the population have about a dismantling of white supremacy. I was thinking earlier this morning when I read what was happening in Buffalo, I thought to myself, "Gee, really, maybe the idea should not be the fear of white replacement, but really to examine critical race theory as something that incorporates white people," because they have an idea.

There's an idea that some white people believe that critical race theory has something that has exclusionary property to it. I get that, but at the same time, critical race theory as it applies to white people might be very, very helpful in terms of giving people a little bit more broader idea of where whiteness begins and where it should extend itself or not extend itself versus it being something that is a threat or a shrinkage, but a sense of expansion.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Any thought about that, Michael?

Michael Edison Hayden: Yes. My first thought is the more we're focusing on unity and inclusion, the better we're going to be in the long run. I think that absolutely telling the difficult stories about our history and the history of white supremacy in this country is so important because we need to be able to stop these things from happening or at least mitigate the danger. After the Trump era, I don't think anybody can be under the illusion that things are going particularly well in terms of unity in this country. In order to get over it, yes, we need to be inclusive and we need to bring people in as much as possible. I don't know if that's answered your question, but I'm all for that.

Brian Lehrer: Cassandra, thank you. Kanene in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kanene.

Kanene: Hi. Literally, I'm in Harlem, you can hear the sirens. I'm so excited [unintelligible 00:18:46] Southern Poverty Law Center, yes, all of what you're saying, I'm literally tweeting right now. What I wanted to say and I'm tweeting it as well is this notion of whiteness and controlling the narrative. Because whiteness controls the narrative, specifically in the media, then also other narratives that include curriculum, which is what I do, writing anti-racist curriculum, I just got my third National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study the history of racism in this country, so because the narrative is default to whiteness, it defaults also to the notions of victimization, the notions of purity, the notion of it being the standard.

We are constantly programmed from Disney, from cartoons, from books, from everything to say, "Oh, oh, oh, we can't see that person crying." If it shifts just a little bit, if the narrative shifted, if there's a tiny little window, like what happened with George Floyd this tiny window, what happened? What happened in the two years since George Floyd? The narrative, controlling the narrative of we're [unintelligible 00:19:56] white back, and as I like to say, Black to normal, which is gaslighting conversations about racism, which is why this whole taking over the school boards, like you talked about in the last segment, also happens. This constant--

Why would someone really believe in this system that is systemically oppressive disproportionately successfully? The system is doing what it's supposed to do. Successfully suppressing, oppressing, marginalizing, disenfranchising people of color and also specifically the notion of anti-blackness, specifically towards Black people. Hence that's why I do Black history issues.

Why would somebody sit on their couch, listen to chucker Carlson and then think that they are the victim? Because, again, controlling this narrative, which is 400 years long. We're not even talking about eugenics at this point, we're talking about right now modern media is still satiating this need for game shows, reality shows, and not sustaining this notion of ending racism in this country.

Even every media outlet has not sustained that constant segment of Black people talking about racism, ending it like they did in George Floyd. It was a flurry of that and then it all ended. It's what I call Black to normal. We are all complicit in this. This is why I think it's really important to do curriculum. That's what I do, I'm an educator, but people who are in the media need to also think about how much time are they allocating to anti-racist content.

We have to co-create an anti-racist society because right now we are in this moment co-creating still a racist society and racism is overt and covert. Overt racism happened. Buffalo a few days ago with the white supremacist judgment, that is overt, that is acute, that is in our face. Think about all the other, that's why I'm about to tweet it out right now, think about all the other forms of racism that are codified in our language, that are codified-- I'm literally going to just tweet it right now even though I'm not done, but you all can see it if you all go to The Brian Lehrer Show.

Think about all the ways in which children are languishing. People do not understand how many Black people have been [unintelligible 00:22:09], how many Black people have been scientists, how many Black people have been the arbiters of brilliance. If that's not in the curriculum, if you're constantly erasing that, if you're constantly making it be about the school board war and not about actually who these people are, then we will never get to the land of Liberty, opportunity, and pursuit the happiness that we always sit there and celebrate when we sit there and we look at the American flag and we pledge allegiance to it. There goes that.

Brian Lehrer: There goes that, and we'll look for your tweets. [crosstalk] Kanene, thank you very much. To wrap up on a law enforcement question for you, the Southern Poverty Law Center, I see Michael, your group keeps an account of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing, which killed 168 people and is used as a starting point for a modern era by your group, if that's fair to say.

Notably, unlike Oklahoma City, all the attacks that have happened in recent years, that I mentioned at the beginning of the segment, the church in Charleston, the synagogue in Pittsburgh, the shooting in El Paso at the Walmart, even the mosque in New Zealand, the two mosques, that Christchurch shooting which allegedly inspired this this gunman. In contrast to Oklahoma City, which was a bombing, these have all been with guns. I'm curious if you think that's a distinction that's important for some reason as we look at the arc from Oklahoma city to Buffalo?

Michael Edison Hayden: That's a really interesting point and it's not something that I like spend a lot of time thinking about, where it's like, "Okay, there's this bombing and now they are indeed doing these mass shootings over and over again, aren't they?" Yes. If you look at what's something that happened in between, there was the Columbine shooting. There were a series of mass shootings, if you recall, there was-- Was his name Holmes, in Denver, I believe? Was he the one who dressed up like the joker from Batman? A lot of these during the Obama era, these horrific mass shootings in which people would go in and just stage their contempt for humanity in some horrific way and just shoot up a bunch of people.

What is interesting, and it only occurred to me after you asked this question, is that those attacks, which were predominantly staged by young white men, began to take on a much more, for lack of a better word, political tone after Trump took office. This great replacement propaganda that really filters all the way from Twitter and Facebook and Fox News, rolling all the way back to fringe websites like Gab, where white supremacists hang out, or Telegram apps, is really-

Brian Lehrer: Which we saw on Charlottesville at the famous infamous Unite the Right rally in 2017, where Trump said they were good people on both sides, they were chanting, "Jews will not replace us." That was an expression of this replacement theory that people know about.

Michael Edison Hayden: Yes. It is true that essentially, there have been these eruptions of depraved violence in our culture that have occurred this century sporadically, usually from young white men, but not exclusively by any stretch of the imagination. When these things happened, they weren't necessarily connected to white supremacist propaganda, but suddenly, starting it around-- I would say that one in October 2018 is Robert Bower is the alleged killer and he was a middle-aged man who was inspired by-- He attacked Jewish people with the idea that Jews were helping refugees into Pittsburgh. Quite a really disgusting way of seeing the world.

Then you have the Powe shooter in California in April, for example, following Christchurch massacre. Then, of course, in El Paso on August 2019. Yes, increasingly, people who are predisposed to this violence are finding this propaganda and it's giving them what they believe is a sense of purpose.

Brian Lehrer: That 18-year-old in this case, the alleged shooter, was able to buy an assault weapon legally in New York State. He wrote in his document, "There are very few weapons that are easier to use and more effective at killing than firearms, especially the Bushmaster XM 15 I will be using," and he did it.

Michael Edison Hayden: New York, not exactly Texas, we should point out.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly. Yet at 18, except for New York City, you can buy that weapon at age 18 legally and without a license in New York State. We leave it there with Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter and spokesperson with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. Thank you very much for your time today.

Michael Edison Hayden: Thank you, Brian. You can feel free to reach out to me and ask me questions offline.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much.

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