According to statistics, in 2021, there are 733 extremist organizations in the United States, of which 27 advertise themselves as neo-Nazi organizations.
On May 16, local time, Buffalo, New York, the United States, Buffalo City supermarket shooting caused 10 deaths and 3 injuries, police investigation work in progress. Figure/IC photo
Text | Kong Xue
At noon on May 14, Payton Kinderon, an 18-year-old high school graduate, drove to a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and opened fire on people. In a few tens of seconds, 10 people were killed and 3 were injured, and the vast majority of the dead and injured were black. After the atrocity, Kinderlen was persuaded by law enforcement officers to lay down his arms and surrender.
New York police determined the case was a "directly racially motivated hate crime."
1 A teenager immersed in neo-Nazi ideas
It was the 198th mass shooting in the U.S. since 2022 and the deadliest of them.
Based on a combination of information, the Buffalo shooting has three characteristics.
First, the suspects were heavily influenced by neo-Nazi ideas. In his 180-page "Crime Manifesto," he begins with a focus on the "Great Replacement." This is a neo-Nazi ideology that blends anti-Semitism and white supremacy and extreme racism, which believes that under the manipulation of Jews in Western society, the rights of white people will gradually decline, and the number of white people will no longer be majority in the future, so it will launch an "attack" on Jews, people of color, and immigrants.
The suspect said in his journal that after several "stepping points," he finally chose the supermarket in Buffalo City as the site of the attack because he observed that there were "many black people" in the area.
Secondly, the event has a strong imitation. On March 15, 2019, Australian Brandon Tarrant opened fire on Muslim worshippers at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, killing 51 people. A few minutes before the operation, the killer Tarrant published his "crime declaration" online and broadcast his murder to the world on Facebook.
According to the Washington Post, Kinderen posted on the 4chan message board last November that "the Brenton Tarrant incident will soon happen again." Kinderlen turned on the Live stream on the Twitch platform at the time of the murder, and half an hour before the operation, sent his own "crime declaration" to the outside world.
In addition, in Kinderlen's "Crime Manifesto", some of the contents of the "list of enemies in high positions" and "green nationalism" are exactly the same as those of Tarrant's "Crime Declaration". Apparently, Kinderen is deliberately imitating or even "paying tribute" to Tarrant's modus operandi.
Third, rapidly spreading network spread. After the incident, the live video of the suspect at the time of the crime and the "declaration of crime" uploaded before the crime were widely disseminated through Telegram, Facebook, Vimeo, BitChute, AnonFiles, Streamable and other platforms. Among them, the video material was removed after it received more than 3 million views on streamable streaming. According to the statistics of the counterextremism.com against extremism, the content was removed five and a half hours after being reported by users.
Not only that, but the "second creation" of crime videos adapted, accompanied by music, or online game-style editing has also emerged on platforms such as Telegram and online chat rooms.
In addition, in the hours after the crime, photos of the suspect wearing a vest emblazoned with the infamous Nazi symbol "Black Sun" pattern were constantly retweeted and discussed on social networking sites such as Twitter. Among them, a large number of netizens will compare it with the flag of the Azov battalion, which also has a black sun pattern, and there are many voices about the suspect being a "radical leftist".
In addition to the above three characteristics, there is one more message that is chilling:
The "lone wolf" attacker is only 18 years old this year. According to the Washington Post, in the past six months, Kinderen has uploaded more than 600 pages of diaries, plans and other content on online chat platforms such as Discord and 4chan. These materials detail the whole process of a teenager who is estranged from his parents, has no friends, and is immersed in neo-Nazi ideas such as the "Great Alternative Theory", who has dropped out of community college privately, spent thousands of dollars to buy guns and other armaments, and plotted a large-scale vendetta on the Internet.
"I really can't wait, my parents have sensed something is wrong," he wrote on April 15.
In fact, in Western societies, crimes by teenage neo-Nazis like Kindren are not uncommon. In 2020, Estonia's Internal Security Service revealed that the "leader" of Estonia's neo-Nazi group Feuerkrieg Division, who was under the age of 14, was involved in planning terrorist attacks such as attacks on las Vegas synagogues; in 2021, the BBC revealed that a 16-year-old Cornwall boy set up the terrorist organization FKD GB, which wants to carry out "white jihad" and ethnically cleanse non-whites. The "leader" was only 13 years old when he downloaded the first bomb-making manual and joined the British neo-Nazi online group Fast Forge.
On May 17, local time, in New York, THE US President Biden came to Buffalo City to mourn the victims of the Buffalo supermarket shooting and deliver a speech on the large-scale shooting that occurred on the 14th. Figure/IC photo
2 There are 733 extremist groups in the United States in 2021
Neo-Nazism, white nationalism, anti-immigrantism, anti-Muslimism, anti-Semitism, ecoterrorism... War and conflict, the gap between rich and poor, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic have given these extremist ideologies the breeding ground, while developed social media networks have promoted the multiplication, growth, and mutual exchange and penetration of these extremist organizations.
Taking the United States as an example, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an anti-racist organization in the United States, in 2021, there will be a total of 733 extremist organizations in the United States, of which 27 advertise themselves as neo-Nazi organizations, such as the National Alliance and the American Front.
The symbols of these organizations often have elements such as black sun, black skull, three-legged figure, Hungarian arrow cross, SS lightning and so on. They generally supported "white accelerationism" and the need to use violence to achieve a fascist society based on white nationalism. To this end, these organizations often use online "recruitment" and "training" of members to incite and support terrorist attacks that initiate offline violent activities.
In addition to planning "lone wolf-style" attacks, these groups also carry out cyberbullying against their targets. According to Foreign Policy, the British neo-Nazi group National Action has endlessly sent anti-Semitic tweets against Luciana Berger, a member of the British Parliament, and made her home address, phone number and other information public online.
Payton Kinderlen (left) issued a racist manifesto (right) using the same "Black Sun" Nazi symbol as the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov battalion logo (center). Photo/ An overseas social networking site
3 Two types of communication channels and clear "verbal requirements"
"The basic indicators for establishing a communication network are: to stimulate the most active emotions, to make people feel the strongest and fastest emotional outbursts, and to be the outbursts of a particular emotion... As long as the incentive structure is established around this point, there will be a trend towards this direction. ”
Andrew Marlands, in his book Antisocial, which analyzes extremist online propaganda, points out that these words accurately encapsulate the principles of network communication of neo-Nazi organizations.
The online communication channels of these organizations fall into two broad categories. The first category is mainstream social media such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. The user base of this type of media is huge, and the "opinion leaders" of neo-Nazi organizations share some representative works and remarks on these platforms to maximize the "drainage", and the algorithm push that the platform conducts for users invisibly helps these organizations expand their community size online and constantly motivate themselves.
The second category is more "niche" information sharing platforms such as 4chan, 8chan (8kun), gab, Telegram, Discord, etc., and online chat rooms. Such platforms are usually loosely regulated, often where the "works" of these organizations are "released" and "backed up" at the first time, and the user groups active in these media are often one or several small groups, and these users are usually closer to the "core" of the organization and exchange more careless information.
In the Tarrant case in New Zealand, for example, within 24 hours of the shooting, Facebook disclosed that it blocked the upload of 1.2 million videos. YouTube reported that in the hours after the shooting was fired, videos about the live content were released at a rate of about 1 per second, and these users tried to bypass censorship by editing the size of the clip, adding extra footage, or otherwise bypassing censorship.
After major platforms strengthened their review of information related to the Tarrant case, many extreme users turned to platforms such as 8chan and Telegram. A large number of "fan-made" "works" were posted on these platforms, such as special effects designed to enable users to play Tarrant and shoot people through Christchurch mosques; Tarrant's "Crime Manifesto," translated into French, German, Ukrainian, and at least a dozen other languages, spread on the Telegram platform.
This information provides a "model" for potential extremists around the world to learn from. In January 2021, italian police revealed that they had arrested a man named André Bergeron. C's neo-Nazis, who, according to their confessions, were deeply influenced by Luca Trani (the perpetrator of the 2018 Macerata shooting in Italy), Blanton Tarrant (the 2019 New Zealand mosque shooting), and Patrick Crusius (the 2019 shooting in El Paso, Texas), saw them as "heroes" and therefore established a neo-Nazi group called Nuovo Ordine Sociale and recruited minors to plan violent acts.
In addition, as far as text messages are concerned, some organizations have a strict set of "verbal requirements" within them.
In 2017, a "writing guide" within the neo-Nazi group Daily Stormer was leaked to the Huffington Post. The 17-page document, according to the disclosure, continued Hitler's propaganda tactics, with its overarching directive that "always blame everything on the Jews," who "must always be seen as pure biological evil." The group also requires that the style of writing be dominated by "humor", because "the reader is initially attracted to curious or mischievous humor, and slowly awakens to reality by repeatedly reading the same ideas". The guide also lists the "permissible and recommended" use of racial defamation terms.
On May 15, local time, in Buffalo, New York, a large number of people gathered near the scene of the shooting to mourn the victims. Figure/IC photo
4 Profit model: live broadcast, online store and donation
In recent years, these extremist organizations and their related companies have developed a more mature profit model on the Internet: live broadcast payment, online store sales and public acceptance of donations.
In the case of Youtube, the platform's "Super Chat" feature is able to receive payments from viewers, similar to "live tipping." Because YouTube relies primarily on user reports to flag content beyond violations, and these "opinion leaders" "fans" rarely do so, such activities have brought huge benefits to these organizations.
According to research by the German Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Timcast IRL, a right-wing channel on the Youtube platform that incites people to attack the Reichstag, made more than $200,000 from Super Chat to November 2020 and more than $60,000 on The YouTube platform, averaging more than $2,000 per broadcast.
Facebook was the main platform for neo-Nazis to "make money with goods" by opening online stores. In September 2021, abcnews revealed that at least 54 user stores (affiliated with 39 entities) on the Facebook platform were associated with german ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi organizations, with nearly 300,000 subscribers. Its business includes far-right concerts, tickets to fighting tournaments, pro-neo-Nazi clothing brands, and more.
In addition, many far-right, neo-Nazi organizations and individuals leave donation channels on their websites. According to splc, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-racist group in the United States, on April 29 this year, the far-right conspiracy theory website (infowars.com) in the United States received anonymous donations worth more than $2 million in bitcoin.
"We think the existing system is no longer saved, and the best option for us is to let it collapse, even if it's just in a certain region, and the power vacuum created by [this phenomenon] is very beneficial to us." It was the confession of a neo-Nazi in a telephone interview with the BBC.
Western society is far less secure than it seems. Even in Germany, where anti-Nazis are one of the most "politically correct" social conventions, the German Interior Ministry revealed this month that between July 2018 and June 2021, there were 327 "suspected right-wing extremist activities" in Germany's federal and state security agencies, of which 83 employees of the German military intelligence service and 18 members of the federal police were confirmed to have participated in "individual extremist activities."
In some countries with developed media technology, intensified social contradictions, and serious lack of supervision, extreme organizations such as neo-Nazism have the conditions to breed. Given the pervasive nature of such organizations' use of the Internet for dissemination, these videos, influences and promotional materials can still be effectively disseminated if one country adopts relatively strict control measures and another country does not restrict them.
According to a July 2021 Economist study, the United States has done the least of any Western country in terms of legal initiatives to regulate the dissemination of content from extremist groups. Most of the social media giants are also U.S. companies, and these companies have the right to decide what content violations. Therefore, the United States plays a vital role in the global anti-neo-Nazi and anti-extremist propaganda issue.
However, according to Foreign Policy, there is a "political risk" in the torn political ecology of the United States today, even the deletion of a few white supremacist accounts.
Therefore, Western society may have a long way to go to effectively contain and control these extremist ideologies and reduce tragedies such as the Buffalo supermarket shooting.
Written by Kong Xue, a researcher at Xinjing Think Tank |
Editor| Li Xiaoxiao
Proofreading | Zhao Lin
Intern | Shi Xiaoyan
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