Homeland Security is warning that online extremist and white supremacist forums are pushing for more Uvalde-style school shootings as part of Republican "Great Replacement" theory rhetoric.
The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security warned on Tuesday that people in online forums known for hosting violent extremist content are lauding the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas—and are pushing others to commit further attacks.
“Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks,” DHS officials wrote in a bulletin released Tuesday morning.
DHS officials explained that others have capitalized on the shooting—during which a lone gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers—to push conspiracy theories, including the false claim that the federal government faked the shooting to boost support for gun control measures.
DHS officials also noted that the alleged perpetrator of a mass shooting that killed 10 in a majority-Black neighborhood of Buffalo, NY 10 days before the Uvalde shooting, was motivated by racist conspiracies he found online; the shooter that killed 23 in a majority Latinx neighborhood in El Paso in 2019 was animated by many of the same theories.
Officials advised readers to “maintain digital and media literacy” and practice recognizing “false or misleading narratives” to protect themselves against proliferating misinformation.
Mass shootings have fomented similar conspiracies in the past: after a gunman killed 20 kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, Austin-based far-right provocateur Alex Jones pushed the lie that the federal government had staged the shooting to drum up support for gun control measures.
After Buffalo, claims that the shooting was an orchestrated ‘false flag’ operation bubbled up again. Jones’ website ‘Infowars’ trumpeted that he’d predicted a false flag operation at a grocery store in the days after; an Arizona state lawmaker is now under investigation for endorsing the conspiracy on Telegram following the shooting.
Nobody should be surprised that a shooting at a predominately Hispanic school and a shooting at a predominately Black neighborhood grocery store are both being praised by those encouraging more shootings.
I expect things to get worse, as they have steadily since 2016.
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