Buffalo Killer Ripped Off Past Manifestos—and Mainstream GOP Talking Points
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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