Ben Collins spends his time delving into the darker corners of the internet. He labels himself a reporter on the “dystopia beat”. I don’t know if spending so much time sifting through utter garbage, addles one’s mind over time, but Ben is often not the best framer of topics when being interviewed on MSNBC. I always look forward to hearing from him, because he has researched exactly the info I want, but I am also exasperated by him—his answers to direct questions, are often rambling and imprecise. I think if he has a 2 minute spot, questions need to be concise, or it would just be better to let him ramble for 15 minutes and we can tie up the proper framing when he has finished.
Now I don’t offer that as an apologist, I offer it as my preconceived notions when I notice a thread of his blowing up in twitter. I don’t follow him, so I’ve never read what he tweets before.
I read this thread, and my tweet in reply, was something along the lines of, “A lot going on in there, none of it good.” That’s it. That was my take. Many others didn’t see it quite that way.
This was the big takeaway for many. Ben, your thread can’t possibly be correct, because toothaches don’t cause racism. Racism is racism and I have strong feelings about it! So, Ben has deleted his thread because of massive blowback. I went and resurrected it, here it is in full:
In that Discord archive that’s over 500 pages, the Buffalo shooter wrote about where he wanted to attack, his true motivations, even how badly he needed a haircut. Minutes before the shooting, he sent it all to people he’d talked to on Discord, plus a livestream of the shooting.
The Discord archive are more illustrative than the manifesto itself, because it’s what he actually believed, and not a knockoff term paper that plagiarized past mass shooters. And, in it, one thing kept coming up: The Buffalo shooter had a toothache he couldn’t fix.
The Buffalo shooter apparently tried to get his bad tooth treated. He went to the dentist, and whatever the dentist tried didn’t fix it. He didn’t, or couldn’t, go anywhere else. He alluded to insurance problems. But instead of blaming insurance or himself, he blamed the Jews.
The Buffalo shooter blamed the dentist, who he said was Jewish, but also Jews in general, who he was convinced were the cause of all of his suffering. He openly admitted he started feeling this way at the start of the pandemic, because of 4chan.
At the start of the pandemic, the Buffalo shooter said he moved over from 4chan’s gun board to the white nationalist /pol/ board out of “extreme boredom.” He was inundated with the ideas that Jews were trying “replace” whites on 4chan and social media, and he openly admits it.
Some other shooters read white nationalist literature, the dumb books like The Turner Diaries, which are posted as PDFs on 4chan. But not the Buffalo shooter. He was a creature of the internet. The middle of his manifesto is just copy-pasted antisemitic 4chan memes.
This is why the Buffalo shooter said he attacked the supermarket: He was, he said, “only shitposting in real life,” serving a community of white nationalists he met online. He was killing Black people because that community thought Jews were “replacing” white people with them.
Toward the end of his Discord archive, the Buffalo shooter was getting anxious. Initially he wanted to do the attack in March, but he kept pushing it back. He wanted to do it soon, though, because he thought he would finally get help for his tooth from the healthcare in prison.
A new thing recently is to say that “disinformation” doesn’t it exist, that it’s a “liberal” idea, or that it’s masking real problems. But disinformation is an accelerant. It provides facile, wrong, violent solutions to real problems that need solutions in our society.
Disinformation exists, and it exists mostly to shift the blame of infrastructural decay and resource limitations from the powerful to the powerless. You can call it “information warfare” or “information operations” if you want, but it is real. People are dead because of it.
The Buffalo shooter had a toothache. He blamed Jews because his online community told him they were the root of all evil. He shot up a supermarket for revenge, but also because he wanted healthcare in prison. Disinformation is real. So are the problems that make it seductive.
Ben Collins on Twitter
When I read this, I did note the sentence that probably causes the most trouble: “He shot up a supermarket for revenge, but also because he wanted healthcare in prison.” To my mind, I thought Ben was actually making an attempt to build a narrative for once, despite the thread’s many points. One thing Ben kept noticing, was the problem with the tooth. That is because the shooter kept typing about it, not because Ben was looking for an out.
Ben typed what the shooter stated as his *reason* for killing all of those innocents, and it wasn’t because of a toothache, it was because: “He was killing Black people because that community thought Jews were “replacing” white people with them.” Because he is a racist. That’s why.
Ben isn’t offering an alternative to racism, he is giving us the super important catalysts that brought the shooter to this point. One of the catalysts was the problems that arose from a toothache. Two other catalysts the shooter mentioned were isolation due to the pandemic, and apathy in the form of “boredom.” From there, Ben highlights what path the shooter traveled on the internet in increasing radicalization, to arrive at his endpoint of overt racism.
If there is any alternative information cultivated from the shooter’s writings, aside from the cut/paste “manifesto” or from real life interviews, everyone would be happy to hear those as well. Ben’s thread isn’t the end-all be-all, it’s a result of what he does—present data he has mined from the recesses of the internet.
To rage-dismiss the points here, or put our cancel-culture stamp on it, is less than useful, it’s head-in-the-sand idiotic. I had written a critical analysis of Trumpublican’s nonsensical belief system in: https://100percenttrue.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/nothing-trumps-a-trumpublicans-feelings/
This cancelling is the Liberal’s version of that kind of mindlessness.
Yes Patricia, you found alternate sources for dental care, so this catalyst for the shooter can’t possibly be correct. Does that make sense? I read “The Catcher in the Rye” and didn’t shoot anyone either, so that could have never happened because of my experience. For Patricia and many others, it’s my feelings that are the central topic here, exacerbated by not reading and analyzing the facts presented.
100 Percent True 