President Joe Biden traveled to Buffalo, New York, on Tuesday morning where he gave remarks on Saturday’s mass shooting that is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime.
“In America, evil will not win, I promise you,” Biden said of the shooting that took place in a Tops Friendly Markets store in a mostly black area of town. “Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word. The evil did come to Buffalo and it’s come to all too many places, manifested in gunmen who massacred innocent people in the name of hateful and perverse ideology, rooted in fear and racism. It’s taken so much.”
The Saturday shooting occurred when a white, 18-year-old man arrived at the store and unloaded his gun first on shoppers in the parking lot and then on customers inside the store. Eleven out of the 13 victims were black. Ten people died in the incident.
Biden also called on the media and Americans to reject white supremacy.
“The media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced … by The Other, by people who don’t look like them and who are, therefore, in the perverse ideology that they possess and (are) being fed, lesser beings,” Biden said.
“White supremacy is a poison, it’s a poison … running through our body politic,” the President added. “It’s been allowed to grow and fester right before our eyes. No more, no more. We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None.”
Biden and First Lady Jill Biden also visited the memorial site that was set up to honor the victims where they participated in a moment of silence. They were joined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand(D-New York).
