In May 2022,
a domestic terrorist murdered ten Black people
at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
The alleged shooter wearing full body armor and tactical gear,
targeting people of color.
This is an absolute racist hate crime.
They’re reviewing a 180-page manifesto
reportedly written by the shooter
where he describes his perceptions about
the dwindling size of the white population.
The attack was followed by
the depressingly familiar round of platitudes
about “thoughts and prayers”
as well as the usual series of arguments and evasions
around gun control in America.
The 18-year-old terrorist who stormed into my community
armed with an AR-15,
killing ten people and injuring three others,
received a shotgun from his parents for his 16th birthday.
In rural Colorado, an AR-15 is a gun of choice
for killing raccoons before they get to our chickens.
But what’s often been missing from the discussion around this shooting
is how it neatly fits into a pattern of white supremacist terror attacks
directly inspired by the Christchurch mosque massacres of 2019.
This is how racist conspiracy theory
and emerging tech platforms have combined to create the template
for a chilling new form of gamified, livestreamed far-right terror.
[DECADE OF HATE]
And this morning, we’re getting an exclusive look
at the moment the shooter was arrested
and the warning signs that were missed.
Investigators are going to be poring through multiple online posts
that this alleged shooter made.
Before his attack,
the Buffalo shooter released a manifesto on Discord,
largely centered around a conspiracy theory
known as “the great replacement,”
a fantasist notion that there’s a shadowy plot
to replace white people in Europe and the US
with non-white immigrants.
Forced mass immigration, population replacement,
diversity quotas, and lies about white privilege
and how only white people can be racist.
The obvious truths about the ongoing program of genocide against my race.
Predictably, the people supposedly running this plot are the Jews.
Jews will not replace us!
The great replacement conspiracy theory
has been doing the rounds since around 1916,
when it was proposed by the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant.
It resurfaced in the 1970s with the neo-Nazi David Lane,
who was eventually imprisoned and charged with
participating in the assassination of a Jewish radio host.
But in its modern form,
great replacement theory was popularized by
the French white supremacist Renaud Camus.
Well, I think there is an invasion. I think there is a colonization.
Europe is colonized by Africa
in a much more deeper way than Europe ever colonized Africa.
If you look at the kind of surge in popularity
of great replacement theory, it’s really in the 2010s.
And it’s really, really important
to localize that to fringe internet culture,
where these same ideas can gather speed, gather velocity,
and gather popularity,
and then spread from there to more mainstream spaces.
In 2011, these ideas fueled
one of the world’s deadliest ever white supremacist terror attacks...
3:26 pm, a massive car bomb shatters downtown Oslo.
The target: the prime minister’s office.
But this horror is only beginning.
when a far-right extremist named Anders Behring Breivik
murdered 77 people in Norway,
the vast majority of them children at a summer camp.
A television helicopter caught the gunman in the act,
bodies laying all around him, children in the water,
their hands in the air.
Has said he wanted to start a revolution.
The man who confessed to the horrific massacre.
Breivik, who was obsessed with the idea
that white Europeans were being replaced,
intended for the attack to inspire other right-wing extremists
to rise up and follow in his path.
Hours before his murderous rampage,
he posted this disturbing video and 1,500-page manifesto online,
calling on European right-wingers to “embrace martyrdom.”
These were attacks on the children of a liberal political party in Norway
as well as the bombing in Oslo.
These were attacks not on immigrants.
These were not attacks on refugees.
He wanted to strike out at
what he viewed as the people related to this political power
that he felt was responsible for destroying Norway.
But Breivik’s actions didn’t have the effect he wanted.
Even for hardcore neo-Nazis,
the mass murder of schoolchildren, most of them white,
wasn’t something they could get behind.
This terrorist attack was not something that was widely adopted
by the European far right.
But one man would eventually follow Breivik's lead.
[CHRISTCHURCH MOSQUE SHOOTINGS 15TH MARCH 2019: 51 DEATHS]
Police in New Zealand are urging people to stay off the streets
and to avoid mosques in the coming hours.
41 killed in one location alone, seven at another mosque,
and one person dying in hospital.
The man who is claiming responsibility
and charged with murder
is an extreme right-wing white supremacist.
Nearly nine years later,
an Australian white supremacist named Brenton Tarrant
carried out a devastating Islamophobic terror attack,
murdering 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
You know, the blood is sticking on me, splashing on me,
and I’m thinking, “Oh my God. Oh my God,
It’s going to happen to me now.”
But fortunately, I’m alive.
Tarrant explicitly modeled himself on Breivik,
citing him and his manifesto as his “true inspiration”
and sharing his delusional self-image of being a kind of medieval knight
fighting to defend European civilization.
Police recovered automatic weapons.
In a horrifying twist,
they say the man streamed his massacre live from a body camera
and left a long anti-immigrant document.
He livestreamed his attack.
He turned it into this very horrific visual event.
His manifesto was spread in a specific way online,
where he referenced memes
or he referenced the internet culture he was a part of and came out of.
The key difference here is that in 2019,
the attack was really made for an internet audience.
And that audience was there
and receptive to spreading his message
in a way that it was not in 2011.
By taking and innovating on Breivik’s M.O.,
Tarrant achieved what the Norwegian terrorist
had tried and failed to do:
to actually inspire a wave of angry young racists
to follow him in committing acts of mass murder.
Firstly, he chose a different target,
singling out the Muslim community that was the object of his hatred
and whose murder was more likely to arouse the race war fantasies
of the extremists he wanted to inspire.
This was the first time that a terrorist attack
had been livestreamed in action,
creating a devastatingly effective new form of propaganda.
Now, you can’t find a single person
who’s tried to do an act of right-wing inspired terrorism
who hasn’t been influenced or doesn’t reference Tarrant.
It's all Christchurch copycats all the time.
This video shows suspect John Earnest
going into the synagogue in April, shooting a woman.
Just one month after the Christchurch shooting,
a gunman killed one person and injured two others
at a synagogue in Poway, California.
A shooting around 11:30 this morning at Chabad of Poway.
It’s believed there was just one gunman involved.
He walked in with a rifle.
He cited Tarrant as an inspiration in a letter posted to 8chan.
[THE POWAY SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING FOLLOWS AN UNSETTLING NEW SCRIPT]
Then in August 2019, five months after Christchurch,
shooters in El Paso, Texas...
and at a mosque in Bærum, Norway, also carried out attacks
after posting online that they were directly inspired by Tarrant.
Investigators say the suspect expressed right-wing
and anti-immigrant views online
and was inspired by another notorious mosque attack.
On far-right forums, both Breivik and Tarrant have become memes,
sometimes pictured as warrior saints
or as Chads,
borrowing imagery from men’s rights message boards.
Livestreams of far-right shootings
attract a string of sarcastic inside jokes and shitposting.
Fifty is a great score, Brenton.
I love you, Brenton.
Congratulations, Brenton, on 50 insane kills.
With desensitized commenters
talking about a shooter’s kill count in real time,
as if they were watching a computer game
rather than an act of mass murder.
If you go onto somewhere like 4chan or 8chan
or one of the other kinds of image boards
where a lot of neo-Nazis hang out,
you’ll find them saying to would-be terrorists, “Get the high score,”
and in fact, they’ll create little scoreboards of mass killers.
Despite the devastating toll of racist conspiracy theories
like the great replacement,
versions of them are seeping into
today’s polarized political mainstream,
being voiced by Republican politicians and popular TV pundits.
The left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter
become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement.”
They can’t win re-election in 2022
unless they bring in a large number of new voters
to replace the voters that are already here.
That’s what this is about.
We have an invasion in this country.
From Christchurch to Buffalo,
these sort of shootings present
a new form of white supremacist terrorist threat,
a uniquely contemporary mix of conspiracist fantasy,
nihilistic online shitposting,
and depersonalized mass violence.
When people are being told that their political power,
their economic power is being taken away from them,
by people who are actively trying to disempower them,
it’s a message that really resonates with a lot of people.
It’s decentralized terrorism
without a formal group or command and control structure.
They’re often called lone wolf attacks,
but this isn't really accurate.
They emerge from a distinct online ecosystem
and follow a clear pattern,
paying homage to the terrorists who came before them
and urging others to follow in their wake.
We can’t think of these people as lone wolves or lone actors.
We have to think of them as self-initiated terrorists.
So someone who went out and decided to do something
off the back of the ideology they’ve imbibed.
They act as one node in a network.
But you have to understand that
there’s a huge number of people behind them, behind screens
who are supporting them, endorsing them, egging them on.
It's impossible to say where or when
the next of these attacks might occur.
But sadly, what’s certain is that Buffalo won’t be the last.