The Buffalo Shooter’s Manifesto Is Full of 4Chan Pranks and Misdirection. Don’t Take it at Face Value.

The Buffalo terrorist’s manifesto is full of memetic pranks made to fool journalists and analysts. Some of these are clearly his own decision to include, while others may have been incidental. This is at least partially because sections of the manifesto are largely 4Chan culture internet memes unloaded in bulk and partially because details of how the manifesto was composed are mostly taken from the shooter himself. It’s not known how much actual care the shooter put in to deciding which internet memes to include or exclude, and it’s entirely possible that he put little to no serious thought into which memes were included. What is certain is that deliberate parts of the manifesto are clearly constructed to troll people reading it, and that memes that further misdirect are consistent with the recurring themes in the manifesto.

If you don’t have to read the manifesto, I would strongly urge you not to touch it. If you’re familiar with /pol culture on 4Chan its contents would not surprising, interesting, or remotely unique. Its contents would also not be shocking enough to satisfy a grotesque curiosity for anyone savvy to the culture that created it. It’s predictable in its contents and lazy in its execution, just as the creations of others capable of unimaginable acts often are. There’s no meaning to be found in reading it. There’s only some limited information on a copycat terrorist and the ideas that surround him, all of which are shrouded in shallow irony and a series of efforts to troll readers.

This article is not an attempt to dissect the manifesto or propagate it, but rather an effort to minimize the potential for people who are in positions where they must read the manifesto from falling for intentional misdirection. The article does not focus on disinformation that is meant to incite hatred, which fill entire chapters of the manifesto. Though often intentionally placed with the appearance of satirical or ironic connotations, content like fake Talmud quotations and infographics citing fake statistics exist primarily as propaganda and should be treated as such.

However, if you’re a journalist, anti-fascist activist, or researcher of any kind who is in a position where confronting the Buffalo terrorist’s manifesto is a necessity, know that there are some pranks, made deliberate either by the part of the shooter or the meme creators, that are meant to trick you. It is not exhaustive, but here are a few to look out for.

Sam Hyde

Right off the bat, the manifesto resorts to conducting a long-established internet prank from 4Chan.

After mass shootings, internet trolls will often try to spread viral disinformation that Sam Hyde, a shock-value Youtuber popular with the internet’s far-right, was the culprit. In 2017, a United States Congressman even told CNN that Sam Hyde was the name he was provided as the culprit of a mass shooting at a church that killed 27. Hyde, known for his discomforting presence and his engagement of alt-right culture, including Holocaust denial, has also created content promoting the prank by basing a character off of the fictionalized mass murderer version of himself created by 4Chan users. Typical posts engaging in the viral trend usually involve the same photograph of Sam Hyde carrying an AK-47 in a grass field with or without his name being mentioned.

In the shooter’s manifesto, he presents a photograph of Sam Hyde as though it is him.

It’s been done often and it doesn’t come across as a concentrated effort, so if anything is to be learned from it it’s that it might just be there to set the tone for the rest of the manifesto.

Loxism

A great deal of the manifesto’s lengthy content regarding Jews is memetic. The manifesto claims that Jews are likely to have a variety of conditions, including “Loxism”, which is listed alongside several real psychological conditions. Loxism is a fictional ideology created as a method to promote hate speech towards Jews. It refers to a theoretical inherit hatred of non-Jewish people. Its name is a reference to Lox, a popular Yiddish food, and it used to normalize antisemitism through irony poisoning. In 2020, Forward wrote a piece explaining the hateful term, which they note has been used since 2005.

It should be noted that much of the text in the manifesto is plagiarized from other manifestos and internet memes. Though much of the writing is copied from the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, this portion isn’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is original, either.

Mike Cernovich and Mass Shooter Nikolas Cruz as Targets of Antisemitism

One of the many antisemitic memes present in the manifesto is a collage of prominent Jewish people being compared to animals and fictional monsters. The last faces presented are ones that the meme purports are that of the “jewish [sic] rodent phenotype”, and they include Ben Shapiro and Nikolas Cruz. While Ben Shapiro is a Jewish right-wing media personality, Nikolas Cruz is the culprit of a mass murder of 17 people at his high school in February of 2018. Cruz was reported to have been involved in what appeared to be white supremacist private chats by CNN, who quoted Cruz as saying “I hate jews, ni**ers [sic], immigrants”.

The meme also presents alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich, a former ally of several white nationalists, as being Jewish. Though Cernovich was thought by some on the alt-right to be Jewish, he is not known to be. In 2016 he revealed that the wife of prominent neo-Nazi podcaster Mike Peinovich was Jewish in a video titled “Cernovich vs “Baked Alaska” Part 6: The Same Person Calling Me K*keovich is Married to a Jew”.

Fake Ben Garrison Comics

At least two fake Ben Garrison comics appear in the manifesto. Though Ben Garrison, a proudly right-wing political cartoonist, has been accused of racist depictions and has undoubtedly echoed disproven conspiracy theories, the most egregious work attributed to his name is an ocean of falsely attributed comic strips. Years ago, 4Chan users began heavily modifying Ben Garrison’s comic strips to incorporate extremely racist depictions, often inserting the antisemitic character Happy Merchant in particular into his work. As the comics continued to be falsely attributed to Garrison and he spoke out against them, his signature would also be added to hateful memes that didn’t incorporate his work in an effort to incite harassment towards him. In a 2017 Wired article about Ben Garrison’s efforts to reclaim his name from the alt-right, Garrison stated that one particular racist modification of his work was “more successful” than he was.

Contradictions of Ideologies

In some parts, the shooter used deliberately loose language and forced the reader to interpret their political labels. In others, they state their own political labels plainly. They also present a history of engaging with ideologies conflicting their own. This is a strategy used by some extremists to create a false narrative that their ideology was chosen from a logical conclusion. In reality, accounts from far-right extremists that they lived under diverse ideologies that conflict with their own (most often Liberalism, Democratic Socialism, Anarchism, or Communism) are often dubious when described in detail. Much like seemingly forced mentions of Critical Race Theory in the manifesto, the shooter’s language of political ideology and his claims of having engaged in conflicting political ideologies earnestly are almost certainly present in order to create public conflict about his motives.

No matter what a person could misinterpret or deliberately use out of context from his manifesto, the shooter is a white supremacist neo-Nazi who was extremely engaged with modern far-right subcultures.