“White supremacy is a poison, it’s a poison … running through our body politic,” Biden said, adding that silence is “complicity.”
“And 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.”
He added, “In America, evil will not win, I promise you. 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.”
Speaking at the close of his visit to the city, the President remembered each of the victims of the shooting at a grocery store frequented by a largely Black clientele, becoming visibly emotional as he described how they were remembered by their families and their community.
Among the victims, he described how Celestine Chaney was in the store to buy strawberries to make a shortcake, how Roberta Drury moved back home to help her brother who had a bone marrow transplant and was buying groceries for dinner, and how Andre Mackniel “went to buy his 3-year-old son a birthday cake.”
After taking a pause, Biden said, “His son’s celebrating a birthday, asking, ‘Where’s daddy?'”
The President said at the root of the violence is hate fomented by “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 he rejects “the lie” of White supremacy and called on all Americans to do the same. And he condemned figures “who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit,” but he didn’t name specific individuals.
The President also harkened back to the chant heard at a deadly White supremacist rally in Charlotteville, Virginia, where demonstrators were heard saying, “You will not replace us.” The President has long said that the rally served as the impetus of his 2020 run.
Earlier Tuesday, the Bidens visited a memorial site for the victims, where the first lady placed a bouquet of flowers and the first couple bowed their head in a moment of silence.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and other officials also added bouquets to the memorial site.
Josh Geltzer, deputy homeland security adviser at the National Security Council, on Tuesday suggested new executive actions on guns could be coming but did not elaborate.
“We have a firearms problem in this country,” Geltzer told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “New Day.” “This weekend drove that home, not just in Buffalo, but elsewhere in the country. And so you will hear more from the President about how we will continue to use executive action where we can to try to protect Americans.”
Buffalo shooting being investigated as a hate crime
Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo is the latest high-profile mass shooting in which authorities have said the suspect was motivated by hate, including attacks at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of first-degree murder, and the district attorney has said he expects to file more charges. Gendron is in custody without bail and under suicide watch. If convicted, he faces a maximum of life in prison without parole.
The US Department of Justice is investigating the mass shooting “as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism,” according to a statement from US Attorney General Merrick Garland. The FBI is assisting in the investigation.
CNN’s Donald Judd, Arlette Saenz, Nikki Carvajal, Victor Blackwell, Amanda Watts, Eric Levenson and Travis Caldwell contributed to this report.