The extreme right in the United States, a murderous poisoning of minds

Lhe drama that bloodied a predominantly African-American neighborhood in the city of Buffalo (New York State) on Saturday, May 14 confirms that the terrorism that threatens the United States the most is now internal, motivated by white supremacism. As in the attack on the church in Charleston (South Carolina) frequented by African-Americans in 2015, that of the synagogue in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in 2018, or the one which took place in a shopping center in El Paso (Texas), near the Mexican border, a year later.

Racism, the hallucinated denunciation of an “invasion” of the country, and the harping of the conspiracy theory of a “great replacement” of Americans by migrants, were, once again, the mainspring. It was claimed and assumed as such in the chilling manifesto left, in all likelihood, by the Buffalo killer before his murderous escapade, which also confirms the virulence of anti-Semitism within this American far right.

The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, drew up the indisputable observation of this threat for a long time, without being able to fight against the climate in which these hate crimes take place. If the supremacist small groups belong to the dark history of American political violence, they indeed benefit from the current hysterization, carried mainly by a radicalized fringe of the Republican Party. By fueling the escalation on immigration, this hysteria forbids the difficult compromises which, alone, could provide the United States with a policy that is both fair and effective.

Disintegration

Donald Trump, throughout his mandate, powerfully maintained this drift, by his xenophobic diatribes as by his inability to name the evil during the clashes in Charlottesville (Virginia), opposing white supremacists to anti-racists, as soon as he arrived at the White House, in 2017. He has also actively participated in the decline of democratic standards, in the designation of the adversary as an enemy to be defeated, to the point that a significant Republican minority now considers the use of violence in politics legitimate.

The assault given by some of his supporters against the Capitol in January 2021, and the obstinacy of the Republicans in Congress to prevent the work of a commission of inquiry allowing to uncover possible complicity between the rioters and the entourage of the former president are all additional signs of this disintegration.

Moreover, the responsibilities are not only political. Every night, the incendiary polemicist of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, maintains the hatred of the foreigner while denying the threat posed by the supremacists, with the consent of the owners of the conservative channel, the Murdoch family. By allowing the massive broadcast of the Buffalo terrorist attack, filmed live by its alleged perpetrator, some social networks are adding a final layer of unconsciousness to this disaster.

This spiral is all the more dramatic as it takes place in a country delivered to another fever, that of firearms, and to its share of mass shootings. Here again, the Republican Party is on the move, obstructing any legislation that would make it possible to regulate the arms market while respecting the amendment to the Constitution which defends this right. It scraps even by opposing the most consensual measures, supported by an overwhelming majority of the citizens of the United States. The devastating effects of this poisoning of minds can be counted, alas, in human lives.

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