On the evening of May 14, a [neo]fascist carrying a rifle entered a supermarket in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Masten Park on Buffalo’s East Side and opened fire. While most official statements have more or less vaguely alluded to “racial motivations,” the shooter’s intentions were quite explicitly outlined in a manifesto, in which he wrote of his adherence to white-supremacist “great replacement” ideology.

(Source.)

While some of us have correctly identified capitalism as the underlying cause, these analyses feel imprecise. Example:

Individual acts of domestic terrorism reflect the alienation of mainly white youth, whether racially motivated or not, who, consciously or unconsciously, see no future under capitalism. These youth can become more susceptible to a white-supremacist or fascistic ideology of violently and randomly targeting others for their woes, and not the capitalists. Instead of targeting the system that has poisoned them, they blame those they should be allied with.

From what I have read, Payton Gendron was a jobless student without military training: a bit of an unusual background for a neofascist. Nevertheless, he was an economics student and his ‘prosperous’ parents both had ‘stable jobs as civil engineers with the New York state Department of Transportation, earning nearly $200,000 combined’. These don’t sound like small business owners. In fact, they sound upper-class.

What, then, made this shooter so vulnerable to neofascist propaganda? The default answer is economic competition: with modest efforts in place to promote inclusion, the shooter could have been worried about somebody hiring a Black human over him or Black hirees making his future job less valuable. This proposal is somewhat counterintuitive given that he certainly is not going to get a job now, but class solidarity might have motivated him to keep going despite his unlikelihood of getting away with his crime.

The reason that I hesitate to blame his motives solely on neofascist propaganda is that plenty of grown-ups can witness neofascist propaganda yet leave it feeling unpersuaded. On the other hand, economic competition combined with solidarity with upper-class Whites could have made him more vulnerable to the propaganda.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the shooter was antisemitic as well as cissexist, and while none of his victims was either Jewish or transgender (to my knowledge) the connexions between his prejudices demonstrate that such issues are less isolated than they at first appear.