President Biden on Tuesday visited the scene of a racially motivated mass shooting that took place three days earlier.
During the visit, the president and the first lady laid flowers at the supermarket where 13 people — 11 of whom were Black — were shot on Saturday by a white supremacist who drove several hours to intentionally target a predominately Black neighborhood.
"What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group," Biden said.
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Biden also called for new gun control legislation and claimed that the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — where white supremacists chanted "You will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us" — convinced him to run for president in 2020.
The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, wrote a racial slur on the AR-15 he used to carry out the attack and decried "the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people" by minorities, a belief known as the "Great Replacement Theory."
Some commentators have blamed the attack on Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has repeatedly claimed that America's elites are attempting to change its demographic makeup through immigration. Gendron's manifesto included a meme suggesting that Fox News, Carlson's network, is controlled by an evil Jewish cabal. The document did not mention Carlson.
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