Aaron Salter Jr., Celestine Cheney,

Roberta A. Drury, Andre McNeill, Catherine Massey, Marcus D. Morrison,

Hayward Patterson, Geraldine Talley, Ruth Whitfield, Pearl Young.

This past Saturday, a heavily armed 18-year-old white man rolled up to a supermarket in a predominantly

black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, and massacred everyone I just named.

The killer said he did it to stop the so-called Great Replacement. It's a conspiracy theory that's gained popularity among the far right across the world in recent years.

Its premise says that a secret cabal of elites are supposedly helping people of color take the place of whites.

Here in the United States, the great replacement theory was turned into political

strategy and policy long ago.

And it started in California.

I'm Gustavo Oriano.

You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times.

It's Wednesday, May 18, 2022.

Today, we hear how the Golden State, Liberal Blue California,

how it helped the fringe thought go mainstream.

Thank you. how it helped the fringe thought go mainstream. Erica D. Smith and Gene Guerrero are my fellow columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Erica, Jean, welcome to the Times.

Thanks for having me on.

Good to be here. So, Erica, the 18-year-old shooter who showed up at Top Supermarket in Buffalo, New York and killed 10 people. He came with a plan. What was it? Yeah, his plan basically was to kill as many black people as possible. I mean, that's what's come about, as we know, about him dropping his manifesto online somehow or sometime

before the shooting. But basically, he had scoped out the store to the point of actually going

there and actually walking or trying to walk the aisles. He basically just wanted to shoot as many

people as possible, had picked that specific location because it had one of the highest concentrations

...