ATLANTA — Bored during the early days of the pandemic, Payton Gendron logged on to the 4chan message board website to browse ironic memes and infographics that spread the idea that the white race is going extinct.
He was soon lurking in the web’s even more sinister fringes, scrolling through extremist and neo-Nazi sites that peddled conspiracy theories and anti-Black racism. It wasn’t until he spotted a GIF of a man shooting a shotgun through a dark hallway, and then tracked down a livestream of the 2019 killing of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, that Gendron found his calling: as a virulently racist, copycat mass shooter with a craving for notoriety.
The white 18-year-old from Conklin, New York, who killed 10 people Saturday in a Buffalo supermarket, represents a new generation of white supremacists. They are isolated and online, radicalized on internet memes and misinformation, inspired by livestreams to find fame through bloodshed, much of it propelled by convoluted ideas that the white race is under threat from everything from interracial marriage to immigration.
