Details are still coming out about the man who gunned down three Black people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida after a failed attempt at targeting a historically Black college. But far-right social media influencers are already beginning to attach conspiracy theories to the incident, reported BBC News on Tuesday.
"One typical post from one influencer on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, was seen at least 1.4 million times by Monday evening — and just one of hundreds of similar posts," reported Mike Wendling.
Wendling notes that these posts are generally pushing the idea that "the documents left by the Jacksonville gunman were publicly released by authorities, and compared the situation to a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee in March," in which three children and three adults were murdered before the shooter was taken out by police.
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However, in reality, no material from the shooter has been released by authorities, and the case hasn't been handled any differently from the Nashville murders.
The reason why the right-wingers are pushing this conspiracy theory is that they have been desperate for police to release a supposed "manifesto" from the Nashville shooter, who according to some reports identified as transgender — because they are hoping their documents will prove the killings at Covenant School were done in the name of "gender ideology."
There is no evidence this is the case, and police have said that the Nashville shooter didn't have a manifesto at all and the scattered writings that do exist don't show an ideological motive for the murders. Additionally, the families of the victims are suing to prevent the public release of those writings.
That hasn't stopped right-wingers from trying to claim that the supposedly released documents of the Jacksonville shooter — which were not in fact released — are proof the government is trying to hide the ideology of the Nashville shooter.
Anti-Defamation League disinformation analyst Sara Aniano says they are also pushing the theories because "they don't want the young white male [in Jacksonville] to be demonized, because these same activists believe that young white males are the ones under attack."
Mass shootings often form the basis of conspiracy theories. The Sandy Hook elementary shooting in 2012 famously was alleged by webcaster Alex Jones to have been staged with child actors, which led to years of harassment of the victims' families and a series of lawsuits against Jones. More recently, the Uvalde school shooting triggered a series of disinformation posts from internet trolls claiming the shooter was transgender or a fugitive immigrant.
