What’s disturbing about the latest spate of violence is the common thread of white-nationalist ideology, propagated and readily available on the Internet and developing its own twisted culture of mass shootings. What happened two decades ago with the Columbine shooting — which set the predicate for years of copycat killers, each soaked in the iconography of Columbine and seeking his own moment of notoriety — is being replicated by a loose collection of sick racists.
The San Diego shooter attested to how quickly he’d been prepped for mass murder by 8chan, where white nationalists push one another to undertake acts of violence that they call “real-life effort-posting.” He said he never could have imagined killing even a few months ago, and that he planned the attack in four weeks.
He explained that he was inspired by the Christchurch mosque shooter, who killed 50 in New Zealand and came from the same white-nationalist 8chan sewer. The San Diego shooter aped his hero by also posting a similar long manifesto to the site and attempting to livestream his crime.
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