The 18-year-old European American male who killed 10 African Americans on May 14 at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket surveilled the store located more than 200 miles from his hometown to be sure he could kill the largest number of African Americans. He posted a 180-page manifesto which cited the “replacement theory” – a belief that there is a plot to replace European Americans with people of other races — and 672 texts indicating that he decided since February to kill “replacers.”

How could such a young man, not yet out of his teens, son of two New York transit department engineers, be filled with such venom? Take your pick: First, the writers. Frenchman Jean Raspail published “The Camp of the Saints” in 1973 saying that mass migration from the South would destroy European societies. Renaud Camus, also French, wrote “The Great Replacement” in 2012 asserting that Europeans “are being reverse colonized by Black and Brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event.”

Theodore G. Bilbo, two-term Mississippi governor and a U.S. Senator in the early 1900s, published “Separation or Mongrelization: Take Your Choice” in 1947 claiming that “great civilizations of the ages have been produce[d] by the Caucasian race” and the “mongrel not only lacks the ability to create a civilization, but he cannot maintain a culture that he finds around him.” Therefore, the United States, must choose between a “White America and a mongrel America.”

David Lane came up with the number 14 – written on the Buffalo killer’s weapon – representng the slogan, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children," and a 14-word follow-up, "because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.”

"Lane also coined the “88 Precepts,” the number representing the eighth letter of the alphabet, as a shortened form of “Heil Hitler.” The slogans are often combined into “14/88” and displayed as vehicle stickers.

William Luther Pierce III, writing as Andrew Macdonald, published “The Turner Diaries” in 1978 predicting a violent revolution in which non-European Americans are mostly exterminated. Police found excerpts in the getaway car of Timothy J. McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

This fringe ”replacement theory” seeped into mainstream Republican politics during Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency. Advocates include Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson; New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives; Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick; Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz; and Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance.

Other ethno-warriors include Trump’s aides Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly and Jeanine Pirro, along with the late Rush Limbaugh, writer Ann Coulter, Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk and Daily Wire writer Matt Walsh.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson has cited it in more than 400 episodes on his show since 2016, The New York Times reported. He has claimed that President Joe Biden is encouraging immigration “to change the racial mix of the country … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.” For this, Fox pays Carlson $6 million annually, Celebrity Net Worth said, and his net worth is $30 million, Yahoo Finance reported.

Trump himself, in a July 2017 speech in Poland, described immigration as an issue of “survival” for “the West” and migrants as part of a plot to “subvert and destroy” our “civilization.”

Some European politicians also promote the “replacement theory,” including Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who last week likened critical race theory to scientific socialism and who, notably like Adolf Hitler, gained power initially through the ballot box; Austrians Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party and Martin Sellner, leader of Generation Identitaire (sic); Marine Le Pen of France; and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.

The ethno-centrists started blaming Jews for large-scale immigration, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has noted. As if to prove the point, Unite the Right demonstrators on the University of Virginia campus in August 2017 shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” In October 2018, Robert Bowers killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa. John Earnest killed one person and injured three others in April 2019 at a synagogue in Poway, Calif. He posted a letter online blaming Jews for the genocide of “white Europeans” and paying tribute to Bowers and Tarrant.

But others are also targets. Brenton Tarrant killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand on March 15, 2019, after posting an online statement titled “The Great Replacement.” That August, Patrick Crusius killed 23 people and wounded almost two dozen others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He posted a statement about a “Hispanic invasion.”

African Americans are constantly in the cross-hairs of the racists. They are 13 percent of the nation and it is not clear how they are connected to the supposed flooding the country with immigrants. On June 17, 2015, another young European American male killed nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after obtaining permission to join them in Bible study.

And then there are the websites. The Buffalo killer said he got his information from the Internet and not from personal interactions. But it is impossible to separate the hatred spewed online from that coming from the mouths and pens of individuals. Just as Trump’s stolen election lie has taken hold, so too has the “replacement theory.” There is a reason for this. As noted in an earlier column, Isa Blagden warned in her book “The Crown of a Life” in 1869: “If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth and if a truth is repeated enough, it becomes a dogma and men will die for it.”

Or kill for it, evidently.

Still, tens of millions of mostly European Americans accept Trump’s election lie and many believe the “replacement theory.” Public Religion Research Institute surveys found that, for around 30 percent of Americans, "the idea of America where most people are not white bothers me," The Washington Post reported.

But immigration is not the only supposed culprit. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which chose Orban’s Hungary for its first overseas gathering, proclaimed, “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people every year through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved.” This point is noteworthy, given reports that the U.S. Supreme Court is planning to ban abortions.

The environment also figures into the equation of hate. It is mentioned in the Buffalo killer’s online posts and the New Zealand mass murderer posted: “The invaders are the ones over-populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.” The El Paso killer said in his manifesto, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Betsy Hartmann, an expert in the environment and migration at Hampshire College, has noted: “Eco-fascism has always been a part of white supremacy, even going back to Hitler, but it would seem to me in white supremacist circles it’s becoming a more accepted part of the ideology.”

But whether it is immigration, abortion or the environment, Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote, the intention is to “launder and sanitize these ideas in ways that insinuate them ever deeper into mainstream discourse.” He said it works this way: “A speaker floats ‘great replacement’ ideas — then claims it is intended as racially neutral. … This sort of trickery works on still another level. It recasts racist conspiracy theorizing in a more acceptable form.” Philip Gorski, an expert on movements such as the “replacement” crowd, described it to Seargent as a “fig leaf to hide white supremacy.”

European Americans are indeed on the decline as a proportion of the nation. They comprised 98 percent of nearly half of all counties — 1,412 — in 1980 but, 30 years later, only in 149 counties — fewer than five percent, The Post reported. Brookings Institution demographer William Frey told the newspaper that European Americans will be in the minority around 2042, not only because of immigration but also intermarriage, dropping by six percent between 2010 and around 2050. The Latino population will, however, increase by 102 percent and the number of people identifying as two or more races will increase by nearly 200 percent.

But Latino support for the Democratic Party has dropped from 63 percent in 2000 to 44 percent in 2020, The New York Post reported, citing the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Battleground Survey Project. That, of course, undercuts the argument that Democrats encourage immigration to strengthen their voting strength. And, anyhow, it takes years for an immigrant to become a citizen who can vote.

The key issue, as was explained in an earlier column, is that the United States has never been an ethno-centric state inhabited by one race of people — except when only Indigenous peoples lived here and they were victims of “replacement” — and cannot be made into one, given the changing demographics. The promoters of the “white replacement theory” know this and that no amount of violence can change that reality. They have settled on manipulating the electoral processes to entrench themselves in power indefinitely, this time using Trump’s lie of a stolen election as justification.

The “replacement theory” also provides cover for violence as a means of racial containment and seems to be succeeding. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Saturday found that three in four African Americans fear they or someone they love will be killed because of their race. Most are “saddened and angered” but just eight percent said they are “surprised.” The Post added, “Even before the shooting, in earlier poll questioning, Black people saw racism as one of their greatest threats. After the [Buffalo] attack, only 10 percent think the problem of racism will improve in their lifetimes, while a 53 percent majority think it will get worse.”

This divisive climate is also emboldening the young to display racist behavior even in school – where lessons on the nation’s racist background to counter such attitudes are banned. Within days of the Buffalo mass murders, six students posed for a photo outside Hidden Oaks Middle School in Palm City in Florida — where divisiveness is a form of state government. The photo showed each student holding a large, hand-painted letter, arranged in a way to spell out a racial slur and was posted to social media. Even before the shooting, students at Colerain High School in Cincinnati stuck “Blacks only” and “whites only” signs over the school’s water fountains and posted them online.

The Buffalo mass murders has also prompted questions of police behavior. The Associated Press said that the Buffalo gunman “was the very poster boy for armed and dangerous, carrying an AR-15-style rifle and cloaked in body armor and hatred,” yet officers took time to talk him into surrendering “and arrested him without firing a single shot.” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia cited the officers’ training, the AP said. But, the news agency added, “In a country where Black people have been killed in encounters with police over minor traffic infractions, or no infractions at all, though, it’s raised the question: Where is that training, that determined following of protocol, when it comes to them?” And, unlike what happens with African American suspects, young European Americans are often excused for their murderous racism as being “troubled,” as Washington Post columnist Anthea Butler pointed out seven years ago after the Emanuel church shooting in Charleston. Former FBI special agent Jonathan said that killer probably “has some mental issues” and did not know he had done anything wrong. “That is the power of whiteness in America,” Butler stated. Such shooters are “humanized and called sick, a victim of mistreatment or inadequate mental health resources.” As if on cue, the Buffalo News, reporting on the background of the Buffalo shooter prior to his mass killings called him “this very troubled young man.”

Then there are the victims. Mourners at the funeral of Roberta Drury, 32, described her as having a “smile that could light up a room,” The AP reported. She grew up in the Syracuse area but relocated to help care for her brother who was battling leukemia — to Buffalo, where her life was cut short.

The victims of the violence that surrounds the “stolen election” and the “replacement theory” are part of the tragedy which is threatening to engulf the nation. It is only when Americans of goodwill take a profoundly firmer stand against such attitudes that change can start to take place.

In “Star Trek: Discovery,” now streaming on Paramount +, after the crew finally made contact with the Ten-C, it becomes clear that the alien entity does not comprise individuals but is one and it asks the humans, “How many are you?” The president of the United Federation of Planets sends this response: “Each of us is ‘one.’ We are also one as a whole. Our experiences differ yet we all seek happiness, peace, security and equality. We want that for our children, just as you do for yours. There is so much that unites us.” Is it necessary, though, to wait for the 32nd century — more than 1,000 years — for the dawning of such a realization?

Sonequa Martin-Green, an African American woman and native of Alabama, plays the Discovery’s captain and she too has some advice during the first encounter with the Ten-C: “We can overcome all challenges so long as we do it together.”

Back in the 21st century, that seems a long way off, though it does not have to be.