The Tops Shooting Revisited
The Tops Mass Shooting was not simply a senseless act of violence committed by a young man filled with racial hatred.
It was an act of racialized political violence carried out by a man who had been radicalized and transformed into a foot soldier—and ultimately cannon fodder—for the racialized fascist authoritarian movement.
Payton S. Gendron’s ideology was rooted in the “Great Replacement Theory (White replacement theory),” a core ideological framework of the racialized fascist authoritarian movement that seeks to transform the United States into an authoritarian state grounded in White supremacy, imperialism, and democratic fascism.
The political strategy is to use “democracy to undermine democracy” through suppression of the voting rights of Blacks and other people of color, restriction of immigration from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the whitewashing of history, and the repression of higher education.
The endgame is to “Make America Great Again” by resurrecting the nation’s imperial urge, engaging in endless wars to acquire territorial dominance, and opening new markets and maintaining control over existing ones.
This goal can only be achieved through the political suppression of Black America.
This racist political logic explains why Gendron—an unwitting political operative—targeted Buffalo, a city with the second largest Black population in New York. In this highly segregated community, where East Side residents had access to only one full-service supermarket, it was easy to locate a large concentration of Black people on a Saturday afternoon.
Gendron believed that, symbolically, a mass shooting in Buffalo—a politically active, highly segregated, recovering Rust Belt city—would generate a powerful racial and political resonance that an attack in New York City, a global metropolis and recurring target of violence, could not produce.
Black Buffalo, then, was a perfect stage for broadcasting the ideology of the Great Replacement Theory and legitimizing violence as a means of suppressing Black America.
The politics of fear—not simply hatred—was the engine driving Gendron. He came to Buffalo to terrorize and intimidate Black people while signaling that the outpouring of anti-racist sentiment following the 2020 murder of George Floyd would not halt the surging authoritarian movement and its broader project to remake the United States.
The racist fascist authoritarian movement is continuing its relentless assault on US democratic institutions and efforts to suppress the voting power of Blacks, people of color, and immigrants.
Still, Black Buffalo is standing tall.
The destructive forces of White supremacy, fascist authoritarianism, racial fear, and the hatred it produces, will not intimidate Black Buffalo or the City of Buffalo. Resistance to the racialized fascist authoritarian movement is alive and welcomed here.
By: Henry-Louis Taylor, May 14th, 2026
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