Buffalo killer's 'road map' largely ripped off from other shooters: 'They’re all consuming similar propaganda'
The Buffalo gunman's online manifesto is a mostly plagiarized from other mass shooters' expressions of white supremacist hate, and shows how these screeds are essentially conversations between the killers.
Payton Gendron plotted the grocery store massacre for months and intended to kill more Black people at other locations, and he uploaded a 180-page explanation for his actions that was lifted directly from racist killers in California, Germany, New Zealand and Texas and, like other killers, live-streamed his attack, reported The Daily Beast.
"The document is not meant to be novel," the website reported. "It’s a road map for violence, tailored to a growing cadre of racists who already espouse its main ideas."
Approximately 28 percent of the document was plagiarized, according to the Khalifa Ihler Institute, and relied heavily on a manifesto uploaded by a mass shooter who killed 51 people at New Zealand mosques in 2019, whose words and actions served as a template for subsequent killings.
“It’s evident from this, as well as from other terrorist manifestos that these terrorists both build on each other’s ideological narratives and strategies,” said Bjørn Ihler, a Khalifa Ihler co-founder. “They also largely directly reference each other, not only through the direct plagiarization of text but also often by name-dropping previous terrorists in these texts and other symbolic and textual elements. This goes back at least to the manifesto of [Norwegian mass-murderer Anders] Breivik, which again, largely was plagiarized from other online sources in the white supremacist and Islamophobic environment.”
Other themes from the manifesto sound remarkably similar to Republican stump speeches or Fox News programming, and extremist researchers warn that the Buffalo massacre could be seen as part of a wave of politicized violence that includes the Jan. 6 insurrection.
"Political violence in the United States, and specifically violence involving far-right militias and militant social movements, typically manifests in peaks and lulls,” warns a new report from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. “Against this backdrop, the recent decline in aggregate events should not be taken as a sign that the threat of violence has abated. On the contrary, current trends indicate that it may only represent a relative calm before the next storm.”
Roudabeh Kishi, director of research and innovation at ACLED said white nationalism has become a primary motivation in far-right protest activity, and she said attackers should not be seen as "lone wolves."
“They’re all consuming similar propaganda,” Kishi said. “They’re in the same circles.”