Online, extremists turn shooters into 'saints.' Experts worry others aspire to join the ranks

On Saturday afternoon after a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket — hours before the internet filled with tributes to the 10 people killed, and long before authorities could authenticate hate-filled documents posted online — another phenomenon was already emerging.

Researchers in white supremacist extremism noted the man accused in the shooting was being given a rare title in dark corners of the internet. Memes were emerging depicting the shooter as the newest member of a kind of hateful pantheon: Among a cadre of online admirers, these white-supremacist mass killers aren't criminals. They're "saints." 

For centuries, the Catholic Church has honored saints — people who lived their lives in a manner so good, so holy, the church believes they are guaranteed a place in heaven. But in the perverse world of online extremism, the concept of sainthood has been co-opted.

Shooters who have caused the most death and destruction with a racial motive are celebrated with images and texts by legions of users who have created their own collection of “saints.”

It's an online culture that is now so widespread that "saint" memes emerge almost immediately after attacks. These images, shared on platforms as mainstream as Instagram, have their own rules: A shooter who kills one or two people is labeled a "brother." The title of "saint" is reserved only for those who kill the most people, in the most debased way.

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The subculture deeply concerns experts who study white supremacy and extremism, even as its warning signs remain difficult for law enforcement to act upon. With 10 people dead in Buffalo and an 18-year-old now charged, experts wonder how many teenagers are developing a deep, almost spiritual admiration for racist mass murderers, hoping to become the latest member of this hateful communion.   

“Pretty much every extremist wants to be a 'saint,'” said Kesa White, a researcher who tracks extremists at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. “Who's going to be the next person who's willing to be a 'martyr?'"

Worshipping mass killers

Before Saturday's shooting, a community of extremely online extremists already revered as a "saint" the Australian man sentenced to life in prison for murdering 51 people at Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. They celebrate as a "saint" the neo-Nazi convicted of killing 77 people in Norway in the summer of 2011. And a subsection of the community worships the 22-year-old Californian man who murdered 6 people and injured 14 more, in 2014 before killing himself.

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Almost immediately after Saturday's massacre, the 18-year-old charged in the Buffalo shooting was being hailed online in the same way as Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand shooter, by a community of white supremacists and other extremists who meet on forums and chatrooms across the globe.

"Saint Payton Gendron was only 15yo on Tarrant's big day," posted one anonymous user on the secure messaging app Telegram, adding, "How many other teenage anons like Gendron are there? Daydreaming of their own attacks someday."

There are signs Gendron himself revered other mass shooters and perhaps aspired to gain the title.

A law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that agents were working to confirm documents posted online were the work of the man accused in the shooting. One rambling file echoed numerous themes explored in screeds released by other racist mass shooters.

Photos also showed the Buffalo gunman had painted images, symbols and statements on his weapons similar to ones used in New Zealand.

More: In Buffalo shooting, outrage grows as details emerge about white supremacist motive

Experts who monitor online activity in these dark spaces worry about how many more young minds are being indoctrinated into a worldview where mass shooters are worshipped and where killers live on in infamy among their peers.

White and other researchers provided USA TODAY with examples of memes and other images depicting far-right mass shooters as saints gathered from Instagram, Telegram and anonymous online message boards including 4Chan. Depending on the platform, these memes are sometimes quickly removed when flagged by researchers and activists, but thousands remain, scattered across the internet.

In the last few years, mainstream social media platforms have ramped up their efforts to police hate speech, incorporating everything from artificial intelligence to growing teams of content moderators and experts in extremism. But other sites like 4Chan, Telegram and others have done little to moderate content, and experts worry that even if they do, this community will simply migrate elsewhere.

For law enforcement, monitoring such hate speech is practically impossible, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security. Unless somebody makes a specific threat, against a specific target, then law enforcement officers can't open an investigation into them, Johnson said.

"Saying 'I'm going to kill Jews,' isn't enough — someone can report that but law enforcement isn't going to investigate," Johnson said. "It has to be coupled with some sort of specific detail."

More: From Oklahoma City to Jan. 6: How the US government failed to stop the rise of domestic extremism

The images, which sometimes depict mass killers as holy warriors or crusaders, are often crudely photoshopped and purposefully basic in design. The creators of these images certainly aim to shock their audiences, poking fun at the general public for being so sensitive to their edginess, said Arieh Ben Am, an information operations analyst at the technology security company ActiveFence. He co-authored a 2020 academic paper on the use of “warrior saint” iconography in the far-right.

But as with a lot of extremist propaganda, there’s more than one message in the images, Ben Am said. “It's certainly tongue in cheek in many respects,” he said. “But the adulation is in many ways, for the target community, very real.”

That target community can consist of children as young as middle school kids, who are just starting to develop their worldview and explore politics, religion and ideologies, White said. While most of the accounts sharing these images are anonymous, White said she and other researchers can often figure out who is posting them based on the language used and the frequent use of hashtags.

Often, she and her colleagues are dismayed by how young the authors of these posts clearly are.

“It's not college-age students doing these things,” White said. “It’s very frightening because these are the people that are easily indoctrinated, that are not fully aware of these topics or understand the historical impact. They just see it as being edgy and cool.”

‘Kill counts’ meant to inspire

The memes featuring mass shooters as saints often focus on the attacker’s “success” in planning and carrying out their shootings. The killers are depicted as highly trained, successful warriors.

Driving this concept are the white supremacist theories of the "Great replacement” and “Accelerationism.”

The “Great replacement” broadly contends white people are being deliberately “replaced” by people of color in the United States and other countries. The theory argues that liberals, led by a Jewish cabal, plan to replace white Americans with immigrants of color, in order to guarantee electoral success.

The theory, which has recently been promoted by sources as mainstream as the Border Patrol Union and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, directly inspired the Christchurch attack.

The man awaiting trial in a shooting that killed 23 people — most of them Latino — in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, directly cited the theory in a four-page document he wrote before the shooting.

“Accelerationism” by contrast argues current modern society is ultimately doomed to failure, again because it has been driven by Jewish leadership. Accelerationists therefore seek to speed up society’s demise by committing acts of terrorism and mass shootings, with the ultimate goal being to start a “race war” that leads to a world reorganized along racial lines.

In both of these twisted world views, people who kill large numbers of people — especially non-whites — are considered great heroes. That hero worship has spawned the "saint" images and memes.

Not all murderers are anointed as "saints."

By the contorted rules of extremist online gathering spaces, such a title is reserved only for those who kill the most people. Thus, attackers or suspects from  New Zealand to El Paso are given the title of "Saint," whereas attackers who killed fewer people, including the man who killed one person in a shooting at a Southern California synagogue in 2019, are given the more humble title of “Brother.”

White explained an attacker’s “kill count” (a term co-opted from computer games) isn’t the only factor defining their anointing as a “Saint.” They must also have been driven by ideology, not by other factors like wanting to wreak revenge at a workplace, or killing in self-defense, she said.

“Kyle Rittenhouse is considered a brother,” White said, referring to the 17-year-old who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.”But Tarrant is considered a saint.”

‘Tens of thousands’ view memes aimed at creating martyrs

The concept of martyrdom has inspired terrorists for decades, said Gabriel Weimann, a professor of Communications at the University of Haifa in Israel, who has studied terrorists since the 1990s and co-authored the 2020 paper with Ben Am.

“It’s a persuasive tactic that has been here since Biblical times and has been adapted by terrorists,” Weimann said. “Far-right extremists have learned how to use it.”

The depiction of American shooters as saints isn’t just meant to shock, he said. It’s also meant to inspire other domestic terrorists. Shooters are often assumed to be seeking infamy in their actions, but Weimann and Ben Am said their research shows recent extremist killers have sought to impress this more targeted audience.

There’s much evidence that the people accused of hate crimes in Buffalo, New Zealand, Norway, Pittsburgh and others were active in the same online communities where these memes are now shared, Weimann said.

Ben Am estimated the audience for these memes as “at least in the low tens of thousands.”

It’s almost impossible to tell which of those thousands of young minds might latch on to the idea that the path to sainthood lies in killing large numbers of people, White said. But the fact that previous racist killers are being depicted as holy heroes makes her increasingly uneasy.

“To some of them, they're willing to see how far they can take it,” she said.

'White supremacy is a poison'

Saturday evening and into Sunday, even as hateful spaces online were filling, the streets in Buffalo were swelling too, with neighbors and mourners.

Some wanted to know why, with posts and diatribes so easy to find online, nobody had stopped the shooter before he started.

Soon the internet was filling with tributes of a different sort. To the 67-year-old church deacon who had gone to a soup kitchen. To the community advocate who had pushed to crack down on gun trafficking. To the retired police officer who had fired at the gunman before being killed.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden arrived in Buffalo to console the grieving families. But in his remarks, he made the same connection the researchers had seen.

"White supremacy is a poison," Biden said. "It's a poison running through our body politic, and it's been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes."  

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Extremists turn shooters into online 'saints.' Experts worry others aspire to join the ranks