Buffalo Shooter's 'Manifesto' a Confused, Collective Mess

Last Saturday, Payton Gendron opened fire in a Buffalo supermarket, killing 13 people. This senseless tragedy was the culmination of years of ‘racial radicalization’ stemming from idle time during lockdowns and school closures. (Perhaps adding to the ‘lockdown’ deaths that will never be classified as such) Gendron was all too happy to talk about the attack and his reasons in a 180-page ‘manifesto’ left behind after he was arrested.

Being THAT type of person, I’ve been spending my free time reading through it, hoping to at least understand what motivated Gendron. (If you’re ALSO that type of person, you can find the file here.) Long story short, Gendron believed that whites were being ‘replaced’ in America and Europe, and he hoped that his attack would inspire others and “start the war that will save the Western world.”

Right at the start, Gendron asserts that he isn’t crazy.

I tend to agree with his assessment. It’s certainly possible to be wildly unbalanced and socially inept without being insane. Though Gendron’s fills his document with ‘evidence’ (likely cut/pasted from 4chan or similar places), his collective mindset leads him astray and down the path of senseless violence. In Gendron’s world, all white people are the same and all non-white people are the same.

In his world, whites are ‘his team’ and non-whites are ‘the enemy’. Perhaps if he hadn’t been 100% introverted he could have actually talked to some real people and understood that many (and probably most) white people find his views abhorrent. Perhaps he could have talked to people belonging to minority groups and found common ground with them (something OTHER than hating Jews, please!)

Fear and hatred of the unknown rarely outlives real meaningful contact. I’m old enough to remember when people feared and/or hated gay people. That lasted exactly as long it it took for most people to personally know somebody who was gay — because almost always our lived experience with that person overrode the fear/hatred.

Even Dick Cheney sides with family over politics

Suddenly the unknown is personal, and we’re forced to look at one of the ‘out-group’ as an individual. It is that ability to see people as individuals and not simply part of their ‘collective’ that obliterates the hatred that people like Gendron would like to foment. After all, it’s hard to want to stone the gays when that includes your best friend.

(As a counter example, we recently went through the ‘hate the unvaxxed’ phase, where we saw families torn apart and relationships destroyed because somebody refused to get “vaccinated.” I THINK that sanity is starting to prevail in this area, but who knows what will happen if government and their media lapdogs dial up another round of covid fear.)

We see this sort of collective mindset everywhere in politics, as it’s much easier to generalize people by what boxes they tick rather than to really try to understand who they are as a person. Listen to a politician talk and you’d think there was no such thing as a black business owner or a gay trucker — reality isn’t so cut and dried.

Maybe I have this attitude because of the hundreds and hundreds of sports teams I was on when I was younger that exposed me to thousands and thousands of different teammates. You learn pretty quickly that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and you need to take the time to learn who you click with and who you should avoid.

This attitude is completely absent from our media, who absolutely loves to divvy people up into boxes and then stir shit up between the groups — even going so far to slant their coverage based on those boxes. (Hell, if you’re in the correct box, perhaps they will even downplay your violence!) Another reason that the death of mainstream media as it currently exists will be a boon to all Americans.