Racist rule linked to Buffalo mass shooter ‘plagiarized’ parts of Christchurch mosque shooter, expert says

A researcher with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University said the document mentions the great replacement theory espoused by talk show hosts and right-wing politicians.

BUFFALO, NY (WIVB) – The 180-page speech attributed to a white supremacist accused of Saturday’s shooting of African-Americans at a Buffalo supermarket reads like an operational manual for others to copy, a domestic terrorism expert and extremism. . He believes that parts of the document were plagiarized.

Federal authorities continue to investigate the hate-filled document.

An 18-year-old Southern Tier teen surrendered at the scene and is charged with the mass shooting at the Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue that left 10 people dead and three more injured.

The teenager was wearing military-style clothing, including a bulletproof vest, and the rule claims he used a Bushmaster XM-15, a weapon used by fighters in the Iraq Civil War against ISIS. He had been seriously working on his violent plan since January, the rule says, but spent years buying ammunition, surplus military equipment and shooting practice.

Jon Lewis, a researcher with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said that the people who commit these acts of racism not only want to be memorialized, but also want like-minded people to copy the horrific acts of violence.

“They want people to say, you know what, if this guy can do it with a couple thousand dollars and a store map and no real training and whatever, then so can I,” Lewis said. “The goal of people like this is violence and often they are not picky about who does it, they just want more violence because in their mind violence begets violence, violence leads to more violence, and everyone hopes to be the those who exercise the greatest violence to initiate what they see as the collapse of the entire system.”

Lewis said the author of the document plagiarized parts of a similar rule written by the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.

The document allegedly belonging to the Buffalo shooter, which was obtained by News 4 Investigates, describes in chilling detail how the attack would be carried out and that the racist shooter chose the Masten District Tops supermarket because it was the closest neighborhood in New York with the highest percentage of black residents.

Zip code 14208 is nearly 80% black and the shooter traveled more than three hours from Conklin on the South Tier to kill as many blacks as he could, the rule says. The author also wrote that he chose a neighborhood in New York because of its “heavy gun law,” which helped “reassure” him that any legally armed person he might encounter during his rampage would be limited to a maximum of 10 rounds.

The document includes a hand-drawn sketch of the grocery store and details of how he would livestream the massacre, which he did on Twitch, a popular streaming platform among gamers.

“If you read the manifesto, it was intended to make sure that other people see what happened here in real time so that they would consider other acts as well,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “That’s what you have to close right now.”

The rule mentions how the shooter planned to leave the grocery store and drive south on Jefferson Avenue to shoot more random black people in the streets. The document is riddled with notions of white supremacy, including the so-called great replacement theory espoused by far-right talk show hosts like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and politicians like U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik and JD Vance, the Republican candidate to represent to Ohio. in the US Senate

Lewis said that the grand replacement theory is a white supremacist idea that Jews are conspiring around the world to replace the white European race with non-whites.

“And it ties into the debate about immigration, gun control, anti-Semitism and it’s important to think of all those kinds of pieces as pretty connected, and these are all things, as the manifesto indicates, that clearly motivated this individual. to action”, Lewis. saying.

“So when you look at his posts online on Discord and various other places, you see this kind of continuous path from when Covid started to the attack where he’s more and more online, he’s more and more in these spaces than again. encourage these extreme views and show people that this kind of rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper and deeper where suddenly you’re at the end and you think, you know what, the great replacement theory is probably true.”

The US Department of Justice said it continues to investigate the incident as a hate crime and a racially motivated act of violent extremism.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to conduct a “thorough and expeditious investigation into this shooting” and seek “justice for these innocent victims.”