Bored during the early days of the pandemic, Payton Gendron logged on to the 4chan message board website to browse ironic memes and infographics that spread the idea that the white race is going extinct. He was soon lurking in the web’s even more sinister fringes, scrolling through extremist and neo-Nazi sites that peddled conspiracy theories and anti-Black racism. It wasn’t until he spotted a GIF of a man shooting a shotgun through a dark hallway, and then tracked down a livestream of the 2019 killing of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, that Gendron found his calling: as a virulently racist, copycat mass shooter with a craving for notoriety. The white 18-year-old from Conklin, New York, who killed 10 people Saturday in a Buffalo supermarket, represents a new generation of white supremacists. They are isolated and online, radicalized on internet memes and misinformation, inspired by livestreams to find fame through bloodshed, much of it propelled by convoluted ideas that the white race is under threat from everything from interracial marriage to immigration. “Now you have this new ironic world of killers,” said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. “It’s a different world — just a constant flow of bad statistics, bad memes, bad lies about the people they want to hate. … That’s the 4chan way: You say things that are outrageous that you don’t necessarily believe — and over time you come to believe.” Unlike the white supremacists of old — from the Ku Klux Klan to newer neo-Nazi terror groups such as the Base or the Atomwaffen Division — the new recruits to racist 4chan and 8chan forums are often teenage boys in high school, MacNab said. They act out their rage at a time of dimming economic opportunity for some young people and the changing demographics of a country they have been told no longer has a place for them. “They piggyback on each other’s crimes and, as each one became more famous, then just absolutely made it more desirable for them to copy,” MacNab said. “The joke is always: Who can beat the kill number? … To them, it’s like a video game. How do you score better than the last one?” Armed with a high-powered rifle scrawled with a racial epithet, Gendron broadcast his killing spree live on Twitch, a platform popular among young gamers, and published a 180-page manifesto that espoused the racist “replacement theory,” the idea that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by Jews and people of color. (…) While Gendron ultimately was motivated by a mass killing outside the U.S. — Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 massacre of worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand — he lauded in his manifesto the perpetrators of racially motivated massacres in the U.S. These included Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., to Patrick Crusius, who targeted Latinos and immigrants at a Walmart in El Paso. That shooting, which killed 23 people, has been described as the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
via pennlive: The new generation of white supremacist killer: shedding blood with internet winks, memes and livestreams