'Domestic Terrorism.' Biden Condemns White Supremacy in Emotional Speech in Buffalo

President Joe Biden on Tuesday called the deadly supermarket shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. an act of terror and excoriated the white supremacist ideology that inspired the alleged gunman, but he stopped short of announcing a political agenda in the massacre’s aftermath.

“What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism,” Biden said during a visit to Buffalo. “Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate, and a vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group.”

In an emotional speech before the victims’ families, local officials, and community leaders, Biden assumed a familiar role of grief counselor and empathizer-in-chief; his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972, and his son Beau died of cancer in 2015. “The day’s going to come where the loved one will bring a smile as you remember him or her, a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” the President told the families gathered at the Delavan-Grider Community Center on Buffalo’s East Side.

The setting was minutes away from the Jefferson Avenue Tops where the suspected assailant, Payton Gendron, killed 10 people on Saturday. Gendron, 18, allegedly drove more than 200 miles from Conklin, N.Y. to carry out the attack in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Officials said he scoped out the grocery store a day earlier, with the deliberate intent of killing as many Black people as possible. He said as much in a 180-page manifesto he posted on the internet hours before the carnage, espousing what is known as “replacement theory”—the belief that a cabal of elites is systematically replacing white people with ethnic minorities.