After Buffalo race massacre, rightwing pundits focus on … anything else

A white teenager and avowed racist beelines to a Black neighborhood and fatally guns down 10 supermarket patrons. But what most troubled the pure minds of the right’s leading thinkers? Baby formula, among other things.

Related: The Guardian view on the Buffalo shooting: a wake-up call for the Republican right | Editorial

For the most prominent conservative voices, the major takeaway from last Saturday’s shooting in Buffalo, New York, was not it being one of the worst hate crimes in American history. Or an indictment of gun control legislation. Or an impetus for tighter controls around online forums that provide quarter to bigots and their unhinged plans of mass destruction. No, their major takeaway was literally anything else.

Tucker Carlson – who has openly discussed the idea of whites being replaced, a point that was raised in the shooter’s manifesto – could not even be bothered to weigh in on the shooting over the weekend; his Twitter feed was stuck on a Friday post about the baby formula shortage and included a clip from his rant about it on his Fox News show.

Laura Ingraham was far more prolific on Twitter, but kept the conversation to her pet subjects: the Putin problem, the “wokeism” crisis and larger leftist conspiracy. Charlie Kirk, a 28-year-old talkshow host who routinely promotes conspiracy theories, stuck to a familiar script too – banging on about how Ukraine is getting all the government funding that should be going toward building a wall, when he wasn’t wondering why the recent firebombing of a Wisconsin pro-choice clinic had not been categorized as a hate crime. Republican lawmakers have been similarly loth to acknowledge the obvious.

Per usual, it’s fallen to Wyoming’s Liz Cheney to scold her party for tacitly inflaming white nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.”

Still, her peers’ lack of words for the Buffalo massacre is telling, a departure from the usual round of thoughts and prayers. After years of being sharply criticized for those empty gestures, apparently conservatives now think it wiser to say nothing at all. But there’s a difference between keeping mum out of respect and talking around the subject seemingly out of spite. And given the shooter’s tight embrace of the fringe notions that have been mainstreamed by the right – not least, the great replacement theory – perhaps the right’s most outspoken members have reason to change the subject. To the baby formula shortage. To soaring fuel prices. To war in Ukraine. To any other crisis, real or imagined, except the most urgent one.

When it comes to the sanctity of life in gestation, of course, they’re happy to fume freely about that … but when that loss occurs outside the womb, in a mass shooting? Well, ain’t that America. Nothing to see here than just another tragedy in a depressingly long line that traces back to the Charleston shooting, to the 16th street Baptist Church Bombing, to the Tulsa Masscare – to the very founding of this country.

And saying something constructive or otherwise risks light on a painful subject that, sadly, is nowhere close to changing.