The Buffalo shooting suspect’s online manifesto is largely plagiarized from other documents in similar killings. But the document is not meant to be novel—it’s a road map for violence, tailored to a growing cadre of racists who already espouse its main ideas.
Payton Gendron, 18, is accused of opening fire on shoppers and security guards at a Buffalo, New York supermarket on Saturday, killing 10 and wounding three others. His attack followed a now-recognizable form, modeled in previous shootings. Like other recent racist killers in New Zealand, Germany, California, and Texas, he uploaded a manifesto to the internet before the massacre. Like most of those same killers, Gendron live-streamed the attack. The result is a pattern of almost interchangeable violence, devastating communities of color while an increasingly inured conservative movement promotes thinly disguised versions of the killers’ ideologies.
Gendron’s manifesto is not worth reading. Its mission statement, to murder Black people, is undisguised. It introduces no revelations about the already extensively documented landscape of white supremacist violence in America.
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It is only notable in its familiarity. Much of the document is copy-pasted from previous killers, whom he described in chat logs in idolizing terms. Other points are shockingly similar to those that appear in GOP stump speeches, or on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, as The New York Times previously noted.
Research by the human rights group Khalifa Ihler Institute found that approximately 28 percent of the document had been plagiarized. Much of the non-plagiarized material came in sections in which Gendron described how he would carry out his attack. In sections where he described his motivations, approximately 57 percent of the document was ripped off.
Gendron’s manifesto relied heavily on a document by a mass shooter who killed 51 people in two New Zealand mosques in 2019. That massacre, which the killer live-streamed, has become a template for similar killings, including those in El Paso, Texas, and Poway, California.
White supremacist killers often place their manifestos in conversation with one another, Bjørn Ihler, a Khalifa Ihler co-founder told The Daily Beast.
“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,” Ihler said. “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.”
The plagiarism is unremarkable in the white supremacist world, in part because racist killers have nothing new to say.
Their talking points—bogus racial pseudoscience, fear-mongering about white birth rates, conspiracy theories about the left—have been laundered through far-right and increasingly mainstream conservative media for decades. They are part of an insurgent Fox News narrative about the demographic “replacement” of white people in the U.S., as well as centuries-old eugenicist panics about immigration and interracial children.
But the Buffalo shooting comes in a new moment of normalized violence on the right. It’s the first in its genre of live-streamed shootings since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a deadly event that Republican officials and talking heads have sought to downplay. Right-wing figures like Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have even valorized some of the Capitol attackers, or described them as unjustly persecuted, all while far-right groups that participated in the Capitol attack have reorganized for new campaigns.
Already, some Republican voices have indicated a similar willingness to minimize the Buffalo attack. “Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona Rep. Wendy Rogers posted just hours after the attack, echoing a far-right conspiracy theory about the massacre being orchestrated by federal law enforcement. (Rogers, who is connected to both the paramilitary group the Oath Keepers and the fascist “Groyper” youth movement, has personally promoted some of the same “replacement” conspiracy theories that Gendron shared in his manifesto.)
Some experts say the establishment GOP’s leniency for extreme views could forecast a looming new wave of far-right violence.
A new report from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) this month underscored that, while open attacks waned in 2021, the far right might be in a regrouping moment.
“ACLED data indicate that political violence in the United States, and specifically violence involving far-right militias and militant social movements, typically manifests in peaks and lulls,” the report cautioned. “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, told The Daily Beast that the far right is currently undergoing a surge in on-the-ground mobilization, and that white supremacist attitudes are the movement’s largest rallying point.
“The report notes how white nationalism, white supremacy, has become an increasingly salient driver when it comes to protest activity that involves far-right militias and far-right militant social movements. And in fact, at the end of last year, we saw that it was the primary driver of protest activity for these types of groups.”
In this context, she said, attackers like Gendron shouldn’t be viewed as “lone wolves” but as actors “connected to this broader movement.”
“They’re all consuming similar propaganda,” she said. “They’re in the same circles.”
