President Biden visits Buffalo massacre scene, calls white supremacy ‘poison’ that will not stand
A solemn President Biden, at moments choking up, promised Tuesday that “white supremacy will not have the last word” as he mourned victims in Buffalo, the site of the nation’s most horrific hate-fueled attack since he took office.
Speaking at a community center during a whirlwind visit to the rattled Rust Belt city, Biden targeted the scourge of white supremacy brewing beneath the surface of American society, the toxic worldview that allegedly inspired a white teenage gunman to kill 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket.
“White supremacy is a poison,” the president said three days after the racist rampage in a predominantly Black neighborhood. “It’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more.”
An 18-year-old suspect, Payton Gendron, was arrested and charged with murder after the massacre. He penned a 180-page screed, packed with racist ravings, and had an express goal of killing as many Black people as possible.
Biden referred to the attack at a Tops grocery store as “domestic terrorism,” and as an act of evil carried out in service of a “perverse” ideology. His speech at the packed Delavan Grider Community Center’s gym was heavy on heart, but scant on policy.
It followed remarks from Gov. Hochul and both of New York’s senators. “Buffalonians are brave, compassionate and resolute,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat. “This community will emerge from this tragedy stronger.”
Earlier in the day, the president laid flowers by a memorial at the Tops supermarket, and spoke with first responders and families of victims.
“They’re going to be in pain for a long while,” Biden said of the families, as he boarded Air Force One for his flight back to Washington.
“But they will get to the point where they’ll open a closet door or they’ll ride by a park or they’ll eat their favorite ice cream, and they’ll think of the person they lost, and they’ll smile before they cry,” he told reporters. “That’s when they know you’re going to make it.”
In his speech, the president offered tributes to the innocents who were mowed down on a routine afternoon at the grocery store.
They included a church deacon who fed the homeless. A great-grandmother who sang in the church choir. A beloved Buffalo cop-turned-security guard who lost his life as he exchanged gunfire with the shooter.
“You feel like there’s a black hole in your chest,” said Biden, who has lost a wife and two children in his 79 years, addressing a community in pain. “As a nation, I say to the families: We remember them.”
And he promised: “In America, evil will not win.”
“This venom, this violence cannot be the story of our time,” the president said.
Biden skipped policy pledges, referring glancingly to crackdowns on assault weapons and hateful ideologies circulating on social media.
Hochul, a Buffalo-born Democrat who had summoned the president to Western New York, has pushed for a “national response” to crack down on guns and demanded that social media giants police hate on their platforms.
In her speech on Tuesday, she said America needs “a national gun policy that’s common-sense like we have here in New York.” She noted that Gendron is believed to have purchased a powerful firearm magazine in Pennsylvania prior to the attack.
“You know how easy that is?” the governor said, sounding exasperated. Gendron’s hometown of Conklin is located in New York’s Southern Tier, less than a 10-minute drive from the Pennsylvania state line.
As Biden stood on the tarmac of Buffalo’s airport before his flight out of town, he suggested he has limited options to stir the action advocated by Hochul. The president said there is “not much” he can do through executive action and that he has “got to convince the Congress.”
“I’m going to try,” Biden said. “I’m going to try.”
If the path for stronger national gun control measures looked bleak, the president still projected urgency on the matter of anti-Black racism, a sin that surfaced with such ferocity on Buffalo’s East Side.
He has often said his last White House bid was inspired by President Donald Trump’s muted response to the tiki torch-toting white supremacists who marched in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va.
On Tuesday, Biden called on the country to join as one to “reject white supremacy” and the vile attacks of the “hate-filled minority.”
“We have to refuse to live in a country where Black people going about a weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause,” Biden said in his speech. “We must all enlist in this great cause of America.”
