Wednesday 18 May 2022 10:10 PM Diary of white supremacist Buffalo gunman has entries where he 'doubled down on ... trends now

A white supremacist who gunned down 10 black people at a Buffalo supermarket meticilously planned the massacre in thousands of twisted entries online. 

Payton Gendron, 18, spent months agonizing over the details of his plan to carry out a mass shooting, according to the daily entries posted the digital message app Discord, which was provided to the Dailymail.com by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

While wearing military gear, he opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon in the parking lot and inside the Tops Friendly Supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, on Saturday afternoon. The FBI called the attack 'racially motivated violent extremism.'

Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were black. Ten of the victims were killed in the rampage, part of which the gunman live-streamed on a social media platform. 

Dr. Rajan Basra, a researcher at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) told Dailymail.com that a manifesto he posted online was meant to be his 'grand' public statement, but said 'it's unoriginal: much of it is plagiarized from earlier attackers' manifesto, and it features the typical racist memes found on extremist forums.'

'But it's his diary that stands out as its gives us a look at the person behind that public image,' he said. 

Entries included hand-drawn maps of the Tops Friendly Market, where the attack took place, a map of Rochester and a photo of Gendron wearing a hazmat suit while at school.

Gendron reportedly had initially scouted out Rochester for the shooting but decided on Buffalo when he discovered it had a larger population of black residents.

The diary entries also highlight his dry runs which Basra said are supposed to help the would-be attacker on a tactical and even psychological level. 

But for the Buffalo shooter, it was a stressful experience. In one entry on March 8, he described having a panic attack and crashing his car. He wrote in his diary afterwards that he was unsure, nervous, and anxious about his future attack. 

The day before the attack, he wrote: 'I can't believe I'm actually going through with this, never in my life would I think I would be a killer. I keep going back and forth from 'This is actually insane' to 'This is the only logical thing to do''.

Basra said what made him go through with the shooting is 'appears to be his repeated exposure to extremist material - reading the manifestos of other attackers, and spending time on extremist forums.'

'That also shows who his audience was for the attack: he was obsessed by the attacks carried out by other extremists. He wanted to emulate them, and even kill more people than them. So while the attack had a global audience, he was also trying to impress a niche crowd of like-minded extremists that spend time on the same online forums as him.'

One of the entries explains that he was radicalized during the pandemic and that his exposure to extremists sites motivated him.  

'My current beliefs started when I first started to use 4chan a few months after covid started,' Gendron wrote in the diary.

'There I lost myself and a bit of my sanity,' Gendron wrote of the pandemic's earliest days.

'I remember I went to my cousin's house with a mask and full get up and no one else did and seeing that caused me so much pain. Eventually it was too much to bear and I had to leave early and walk home through the woods, I then barricaded myself in the basement for a few days.'

'Every time I think maybe I shouldn't commit to an attack I spend 5 min [on] /pol/, then my motivation returns,' he

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