Payton Gendron’s 180-page manifesto borrowed straight from the site’s politics boards, echoing antisemitic and racist myths. Just weeks after 4chan motivated a quadruple shooting in Washington, the racist and conspiracy-oriented online message board probably inspired the killings of 10 at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo over the weekend. A 180-page manifesto, allegedly released by the accused along with a video of the attack, is rife with pseudo-scientific racism, antisemitic conspiracy theories and a call for others to mimic his violence. The screed is mostly plagiarized from other extremists and from the far-right 4chan. The 18-year-old white man charged with carrying out the massacre – before turning himself over to police at the scene – wrote that “extreme boredom” drove him to 4chan in March 2020. Payton Gendron first fell into logging on the message board daily when coronavirus-related lockdowns kept many in New York state indoors, according to the timeline in the manifesto. His family told the New York Post that isolation and paranoia inflicted by the pandemic made him snap – possibly a preview of Gendron’s legal defense. (…) The manifesto contains hundreds of racist and antisemitic memes borrowed straight from 4chan’s politics boards and spells out the philosophy behind the attacks: the racist myth that Democrats favor open immigration policies and high birthrates for Black people to “replace” Republican voters and seize control of America. Buffalo shooting: what we know about the victims so far Read more That so-called great replacement myth, sometimes more bluntly termed “white genocide theory,” has found particularly fertile ground in places like 4chan. (…) The manifesto details the baseless racism that underpins the philosophy, including the idea that Jewish people secretly control the world, and that the genetic differences between the races make them incompatible. One particular image, sourced from 4chan, claims to show “the truth about race” – compiling a handful of debunked, misunderstood, or cherrypicked studies to assert the claim that certain races are inferior to whites. The manifesto even seeks to back up its claims with the long-abandoned pseudoscience of phrenology, which studies the sizes and shapes of craniums. While these claims have no basis in modern biology or sociology, they are established doctrine on 4chan, where even conversations on a board devoted to cooking frequently veer into racist slurs and junk race science. The popularity of these ideas on 4chan has bubbled up into the mainstream (…) In Discord chat logs believed to be written by Gendron, he writes, “I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts.” Early in 2022 he explained that only 4chan – including the board dedicated to Nazi ideology – gave him the real news he sought. “White genocide is real when you look at data, but is not talked about on popular media outlets,” he wrote. He confessed to browsing 4chan daily and that he “barely interacts with regular people”. 4chan is also notorious for praising and deifying other mass shooters and white supremacist terrorists. Gendron’s alleged manifesto has ample evidence of their influence on him.
via guardian: How 4chan’s toxic culture helped radicalize Buffalo shooting suspect