Democrats hit GOP over ‘replacement theory’

Democrats are taking Republicans to task this week following a racist mass shooting in western New York, accusing GOP lawmakers of fomenting violence by embracing the same white nationalist views as the alleged gunman.

Lawmakers in both parties have been horrified by the massacre in Buffalo, where a lone gunman shot 13 people — 10 of them fatally — at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood on Saturday afternoon. The suspect, an 18-year-old from Conklin, N.Y., a small rural town 200 miles east, had reportedly posted a long, online screed voicing fears that America’s white population is being overrun by growing numbers of minorities.

That conspiracy, known as “replacement theory,” has a long history at the fringes of American politics, reverberating for decades within the underground worlds of white nationalism and white supremacy.