MAKE BUFFALO THE LAST RACIST SLAUGHTER

During my time at the NYPD Intelligence Division, whenever there was a terrorist attack anywhere around the world, the questions asked at 1 Police Plaza weren’t who did it and why, but: What can we learn from this attack, and were there any patterns or indicators that might have enabled it to be detected, interrupted and prevented?

That philosophy, which came directly from then-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and then-deputy commissioner of intelligence, David Cohen (and still in effect today), led to a deep analysis of the process by which the Al Qaeda-inspired plotters in Amsterdam, London, Sydney, Toronto and Copenhagen radicalized to violence and the 2007 “Radicalization in the West” report, which sought to explain how Islamist ideology and aggrieved young Muslim men fused into a dangerous threat.

The white supremacist attack in Buffalo comes as the latest incarnation of a different phenomenon that has now eclipsed Islamist terrorism in terms of its deadliness for Americans. In 2015, a white supremacist terrorist mass shooting occurred in Charleston, S.C., in which nine African-Americans were killed in church. Then in October of 2018 and April of 2019, two white supremacists killed a total of 12 Jewish worshipers in attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego, similarly motivated by hate. And just four months later came the August 2019 terrorist attack targeting Mexicans in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart.

However, it was the horrendous March 2019 attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a racially motivated gunman livestreamed his attack on mosques filled with worshipers observing Friday prayers, killing 51, that most inspired the Buffalo shooter.

In each of these white supremacist terrorism cases, the killers exhibited similar behaviors. Both the San Diego and New Zealand gunmen posted hate-filled online manifestos that included racist and anti-Semitic memes and conspiracy theories, content that proliferates widely across the internet subculture. Both of them mentioned or alluded to the “white genocide” — a white supremacist adaptation of the great replacement theory that warns that the white race is “dying” because of growing nonwhite populations and “forced assimilation.”

Rather than the martyrdom video that jihadists used to justify and explain their blood-soaked terrorism, the Buffalo gunman released a number of documents on the day of the attack — most importantly his manifesto of 180 pages and more than 600 pages that comprised the transcripts from his personal diary taken from the chat platform Discord. Together, they provide just the type of digital exhaust that NYPD intelligence analysts will be poring over to understand how an 18-year-old from a small town in New York’s rural Southern Tier became a deadly racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist.

While the manifesto has sections and elements plagiarized from these other white supremacist terrorists in Christchurch,

Poway, El Paso, Charleston and Halle, Germany, what is of more utility to analyze is his diary, which documents his pathway to radicalization and, ultimately, his mobilization to deadly violence.

The Buffalo shooter spent his time in the deep and dark corners of the internet, and his digital diary is littered with bigoted memes from a variety of internet platforms — Reddit the most, followed by 4chan and 8chan, virulently racist and anti-Semitic message boards. He was also a big user of the gaming platforms Discord and Twitch. These gaming ecosystems, where violence is considered fun, have become petri dishes for infusing hate into the psyche of the players.

The diary details how he got into the “chan space” at the start of the pandemic, wandering down these racist rabbit holes while he was bored. This is where he “discovered” the great replacement conspiracy theory, as well as disinformation and racist conspiracy theories about African-Americans, and decided he agreed with what he was reading.

This fits a pattern that terrorism analysts are increasingly familiar with. These are stories of aimless young men — usually white and frequently interested in video games — that visit mainstream websites like YouTube looking for direction or distraction, discover far-right videos (either by accident or with intention) and are seduced by content created by a virtual community of white power fanboys.

But it is not just the deep and dark corners of the internet that provide the gateway to the ecosystem of white supremacist conspiracy theories. Time and time again, when analyzing the radicalization pathways of these individuals, the crucial

roles of meme culture, video games and livestreaming reoccur.

Memes are so effective in shaping outlooks because they are supposed to be funny and taken as a joke. While they pose as harmless, their subtle messages normalize extremist views over time, with the humor providing a veil of deniability. Evocative images provoke outrage, instill fear and/or hatred towards specific groups, reinforce a sense of belonging within their own community and ultimately manipulate perceptions first online and then in real life.

Online video games often serve as a medium through which to recruit new members and offer alternative narratives to distant audiences. While the games may be militaristic and violent, the real problems come with online chatrooms that happen during the videos, which promote conspiracy theories. This is exacerbated by live-streaming platforms in which users stream themselves playing games while talking to their audience.

While Al Qaeda and ISIS’s seductive ideology attracted disaffected young Muslim men to their cause, in most cases, it was a social aspect — a sense of belonging to a group — that outweighed the role of ideology in mobilizing them to violence. Similarly, rather than the ideology behind white nationalism that may initially appeal to young white men, it is likely the sense of being part of a “heroic struggle” and a mission larger than themselves that provides an identity, mobilizes them to violence and validates them.

Unfortunately, not unlike the threat from homegrown terrorists inspired and radicalized by Al Qaeda and ISIS, racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists, who are now America’s greatest domestic terrorism threat, do not present easy answers for society or government.

In the security world, we use an equation to think about risk. Threat = capabilities x intentions. So when we look at how to mitigate this threat, there are three general areas we can consider: prevention of radicalization, which reduces intention, and pre-operational detection and disruption, as well as limiting the means of attack, which reduce capabilities.

One way to reduce radicalization would be to limit the proliferation of white supremacist ideology in the online forums that impressionable young men inhabit — both in the chatrooms of online gaming forums and in the unregulated world of Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, Discord, Twitch and other social media forums that conduct very limited content moderation.

It is expensive to monitor one’s users and arguably bad for business to kick people out based on their racist or xenophobic commentary. However, enforcing platforms’ own “terms of use,” like Twitter and Facebook at least sometimes attempt to do, would be a good first step. Gov. Hochul’s announcement that the state attorney general was launching an investigation into the role of these platforms may prompt some much-needed accountability for these platforms.

As for pre-operational detection and disruption, that is a law enforcement function. We know that the Buffalo terrorist detailed his shooting plan and racist ideals on several social media platforms, including Discord less than 15 minutes before he began his attack. However, federal authorities believe they have found more than 600 messages written by him on Discord in the months before revealing his intent to attack. During my time at the NYPD, we developed a special unit that spent time in the online radicalization incubators, seeking to identify violent conspiracies before they came to fruition in the real world. Digital undercover officers, operating under legal guidelines, are a worthwhile investment.

Lastly, there is capability (to kill) — and by that, I mean access for an 18-year-old to a semiautomatic rifle. We are long past the time for common-sense gun control. The Buffalo terrorist wouldn’t have been able to drive a vehicle had he not passed a driving test and gotten a license to drive. How can it be that acquiring a semi-automatic weapon is a quicker and easier process?

Regulating or shutting down internet platforms may lead individuals to migrate to alternative platforms like Telegram, a social media platform that’s been popular among extremists for years. Further, while law enforcement has limitations due to free speech on how much it can monitor and collect on American citizens, lax gun laws make it feasible for individuals barely out of high school to become armed and dangerous, as we saw in Buffalo.

While we search for solutions, the best that we may be able to do is to further study and analyze these terrorists for clues on how best to detect, interrupt and prevent their deadly plans.

We must understand how white supremacist terrorist radicalization works to stop it