The Buffalo shooting is part of a global network of white nationalist terror

The attack has since become a rallying cry for other ethno-nationalists and was cited by Brenton Tarrant, who shot dead 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Both men were mentioned in the “manifesto” apparently written by Payton Gendron, the suspect in the Buffalo shooting, as terrorists he supports.

“This is very much a global network of inspirational events,” said Stanislav Vysotsky, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. “The Christchurch shooter took inspiration from shooters in the U.S., and then he inspires shooters in the U.S. and they then inspire actions elsewhere.”

The Buffalo shooting took place exactly three years after the signing of an agreement by world governments and five major tech companies to limit what content violent extremists can post online. The U.S. refused to sign the so-called Christchurch Call agreement, instigated by New Zealand after the Christchurch attack.

Despite such measures, activists and experts say the spread of racial hatred in disaffected communities will continue. As Bjørn Ihler, a Norwegian anti-terrorist activist who survived the 2011 attack on the island of Utøya, put it: “We are already too late.”

“The ideology is already out there. It’s been out there for ages. …The cat’s out of the bag on that one,” he told NBC News by video call from Sweden.

The “great replacement theory” — a paranoid conspiracy theory with antisemitic roots that falsely claims ethnically white people are being intentionally replaced by other ethnicities  — has entered mainstream political discourse, Ihler pointed out. From its obscure origins in early 20th-century nationalism, and since being popularized in a 2011 essay from French writer Renaud Camus, it’s been mentioned frequently in news media, in parliaments, even by presidents before seemingly being espoused by Gendron.