“The Buffalo shooter, heinous, evil being, absolutely there can be no excuse for it. We hear a lot about right-wing extremists, but this guy was an admitted socialist who was thankful that the conservative movement was dead. … The Pelosi attacking, David DePape was a leftist himself, a radical leftist. And the point is, there’s no exclusivity here.”
The House Oversight Committee held another in a series of hearings on the threat posed by white supremacists and militia groups. After about an hour of testimony by various experts, Biggs made the observations above about two men involved in high-profile attacks this year — Payton Gendron, who has pleaded guilty in the killings of 10 people at a Buffalo Tops grocery, and David DePape, who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Advertisement
One wonders how closely Biggs had been paying attention to the hearing. What’s the evidence that either of these men were leftists at the time of the attacks?
Let’s first look at Gendron. Earlier in the hearing, one of the expert witnesses, Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League, noted that Gendron, 18 at the time of the Buffalo shooting, “was drawn to hateful content on 4chan. He incorporated this content into his online manifesto.”
4chan is a wholly anonymous, anything-goes forum that in recent years has evolved into an incubator of far-right propaganda and conspiracy theories. For instance, QAnon, the conspiracy theory that Democrats are a...
In the rainforest-covered province of Tshopo in northeastern Congo, fear began with whispers. Late last year, villagers circulated alarming stories that a mysterious illness was causing men’s geni...