Originally Posted by
Ben Collins
I want to tell a quick story.
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache.
You may have heard this by now, but the Buffalo shooter spent the six months before the shooting messaging himself on Discord.
He did it the same way you would email yourself a reminder. It was every stray thought he had for a half-year, archived as a sort of handbook.
In that Discord archive that's over 500 pages, the Buffalo shooter wrote about where he wanted to attack, his true motivations, even how badly he needed a haircut.
Minutes before the shooting, he sent it all to people he'd talked to on Discord, plus a livestream of his shooting.
The Discord archive are more illustrative than the manifesto itself, because it's what he actually believed, and not a knockoff term paper that plagiarized past mass shooters.
And, in it, one thing kept coming up.
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache he couldn't fix.
The Buffalo shooter apparently tried to get his bad tooth treated. He went to the dentist, and whatever the dentist tried didn't fix it.
He didn't, or couldn't, go anywhere else. He alluded to insurance problems.
But instead of blaming insurance or himself, he blamed the Jews.
The Buffalo shooter blamed the dentist, who he said was Jewish, but also Jews in general, who he was convinced were the cause of all his suffering.
He openly admitted he started feeling this way at the start of the pandemic, because of 4chan.
At the start of the pandemic, the Buffalo shooter said he moved over from 4chan's gun board to the white nationalist /pol/ board out of "extreme boredom."
He was inundated with the ideas that Jews were trying to "replace" whites on 4chan and social media, and he openly admits it.
Some other shooters read white nationalist literature, the dumb books like The Turner Diaries, which are posted as PDFs on 4chan.
But not the Buffalo shooter. He was a creature of the internet.
The middle of his manifesto is just copy-pasted antisemitic 4chan memes.
This is why the Buffalo shooter said he attacked the supermarket: He was, he said, "only shitposting in real life," serving a community of white nationalists he met online.
He was killing Black people because that community thought Jews were "replacing" white people with them.
Towards the end of his Discord archive, the Buffalo shooter was getting anxious. Initially he wanted to do the attack in March, but he kept pushing it back.
He wanted to do it soon, though, because he thought he would finally get help for his tooth from the healthcare in prison.
A new thing recently is to say that "disinformation" doesn't exist, that it's a "liberal" idea, or that it's masking real problems.
But disinformation is an accelerant. It provides facile, wrong, violent solutions to real problems that need solutions in our society.
Disinformation exists, and it exists mostly to shift the blame of infrastructural decay and resource limitations from the powerful to the powerless. (emphasis mine)
You can call it "information warfare" or "information operations" if you want, but it is real.
People are dead because of it.
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache.
He blamed Jews because his online community told him that they were the root of all evil.
He shot up a supermarket for revenge, but also because he wanted healthcare in prison.
Disinformation is real. So are the problems that make it seductive.