… When a man walked into a grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, yesterday and shot 13 people, killing 10, he illustrated the extreme consequences of the same minoritarian, anti-democracy thinking that is used to justify things like ending Roe and the existence of the US Senate, which primarily serves today as a blockade of any policy not favored by the numerical minority of white, rural Americans who control the 40 votes necessary to filibuster any bill proposed by the majority.
To be clear, I am not saying that all Republicans believe in the racist “great replacement theory” that pushed the Buffalo shooter to kill black Americans, who he viewed as political enemies. What I am saying is that the Buffalo shooting — and other terrorist attacks like it, including in El Paso, Texas, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina — is the product of people taking the predominant ideologies of America’s right today to their natural, violent extreme. And I want to share the social science that shows, empirically, how these things are tied together. CONTINUED
G. Elliott Morris, Democracy by the Numbers
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