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Buffalo killer's 'road map' largely ripped off from other shooters: 'They’re all consuming similar propaganda'
May 17, 2022
The Buffalo gunman's online manifesto is a mostly plagiarized from other mass shooters' expressions of white supremacist hate, and shows how these screeds are essentially conversations between the killers.
Payton Gendron plotted the grocery store massacre for months and intended to kill more Black people at other locations, and he uploaded a 180-page explanation for his actions that was lifted directly from racist killers in California, Germany, New Zealand and Texas and, like other killers, live-streamed his attack, reported The Daily Beast.
"The document is not meant to be novel," the website reported. "It’s a road map for violence, tailored to a growing cadre of racists who already espouse its main ideas."
Approximately 28 percent of the document was plagiarized, according to the Khalifa Ihler Institute, and relied heavily on a manifesto uploaded by a mass shooter who killed 51 people at New Zealand mosques in 2019, whose words and actions served as a template for subsequent killings.
“It’s evident from this, as well as from other terrorist manifestos that these terrorists both build on each other’s ideological narratives and strategies,” said Bjørn Ihler, a Khalifa Ihler co-founder. “They also largely directly reference each other, not only through the direct plagiarization of text but also often by name-dropping previous terrorists in these texts and other symbolic and textual elements. This goes back at least to the manifesto of [Norwegian mass-murderer Anders] Breivik, which again, largely was plagiarized from other online sources in the white supremacist and Islamophobic environment.”
Other themes from the manifesto sound remarkably similar to Republican stump speeches or Fox News programming, and extremist researchers warn that the Buffalo massacre could be seen as part of a wave of politicized violence that includes the Jan. 6 insurrection.
"Political violence in the United States, and specifically violence involving far-right militias and militant social movements, typically manifests in peaks and lulls,” warns a new report from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. “Against this backdrop, the recent decline in aggregate events should not be taken as a sign that the threat of violence has abated. On the contrary, current trends indicate that it may only represent a relative calm before the next storm.”
Roudabeh Kishi, director of research and innovation at ACLED said white nationalism has become a primary motivation in far-right protest activity, and she said attackers should not be seen as "lone wolves."
“They’re all consuming similar propaganda,” Kishi said. “They’re in the same circles.”
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Study finds many existing oil and gas sites must be shut down to avert climate disaster
May 17, 2022
A new study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters shows that keeping global warming below the key 1.5°C threshold by the end of the century will require not just halting the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure, but also shutting down many existing sites.
"Some existing fossil fuel licenses and production will need to be revoked and phased out early."
Led by Kelly Trout of Oil Change International, the study estimates that 40% of fossil fuel reserves at currently operational development sites across the globe must be left in the ground if the world is to have a 50-50 chance of adequately slashing carbon emissions and limiting warming to 1.5°C or below.
If fossil fuel reserves at existing sites are extracted, the researchers find, nations will "substantially exceed" the 1.5°C carbon budget that corporations and governments are already burning through at an unsustainable clip.
The paper, which relies on a commercial model of the world's
25,000 oil and gas fields, leaves unanswered the question of precisely which existing development sites should be shut down, noting that "it requires considerations of equity and of the best mechanisms to manage a just transition away from fossil fuel jobs and revenues within and between countries."
One recent analysis suggests that some of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world are planning or already operating more than 190 "carbon bombs," huge oil and gas projects that could unleash nearly 650 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions and doom efforts to avert climate catastrophe.
"Our findings show that halting new extraction projects is a necessary step, but still not enough to stay within our rapidly dwindling carbon budget," said Greg Muttitt of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a co-author of the new study. "Some existing fossil fuel licenses and production will need to be revoked and phased out early."
"Governments need to start tackling head-on how to do this in a fair and equitable way, which will require overcoming opposition from fossil fuel interests," Muttitt added.
The research comes as the fossil fuel industry is exploiting Russia's assault on Ukraine—and the punitive measures the West has taken in response—to lobby for new fossil fuel development. In late March, the Biden administration pledged to ramp up U.S. gas exports to European Union members as they attempt to wean themselves off of Russian fossil fuels.
Climate advocates warned that the White House's initiative would likely spur the construction of new pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure, potentially locking in more planet-warming pollution as scientists say emissions must be halved by 2030.
"Our study reinforces that building new fossil fuel infrastructure is not a viable response to Russia's war on Ukraine," said Trout, Oil Change International's research co-director. "The world has already tapped too much oil, gas, and coal. Developing more would either cause more dangerous levels of warming, if fully extracted, or create a larger scale of stranded assets."
Thijs Van de Graaf of Ghent University in Belgium, a study co-author, similarly cautioned that "each new coal mine, gas well, or oil field that is developed deepens political entanglement with the fossil fuel industry."
"Increasing the scale of extraction-related jobs and investments," he added, "only makes it harder for governments to manage."
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According to a report from the Daily Beast, a frantic Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) clashed with FBI investigators who were assisting the Florida Republican's father who was being blackmailed -- and then ran to Fox News and lied about it to make the FBI look bad as news broke that he was also under investigation.
As the Beast's Roger Sollenberger wrote, an FBI report details agents' interactions with the younger Gaetz on the day that it was being reported that he had allegedly been sending money to an associate who in turn was reportedly passing along the cash to young women for sexual favors -- raising questions about sex trafficking.
According to the FBI report, investigators were meeting with the lawmaker's father, Don Gaetz, a former president of the Florida Senate, who was being victimized by blackmailers who claimed they had dirt on his lawmaker son, when the younger Gaetz burst in on their meeting.
As Sollenberger wrote, as the elder Gaetz was handing a recording device back to the investigators while asking them to collect more evidence when his son Matt lashed out at the agents.
IN OTHER NEWS: 'Drunk and high' MAGA rioter cites his own undeveloped 'pre-frontal cortex of the brain' in asking for leniency
"That evening—around 7:45 p.m., according to the FBI report—two special agents rang the doorbell at the Gaetz family residence. They had come for their recording device. The sting was off, but the records don’t explain why, and they don’t mention the Times story," writes the Daily Beast, which then quoted an FBI report stating that "M. GAETZ yelled, ‘He has a lawyer!’ multiple times.”
Sollenberger's report continued, “M. GAETZ yelled, ‘Do you have a warrant to be here?’ and asked his father if they took anything from him. The agents did not respond, the report says. Don Gaetz answered his son: no, they only took the recording device they had previously given him."
Following the altercation, Gaetz appeared on Fox News with host Tucker Carlson in what the controversial Carlson later called "one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted."
"Minutes later, Matt Gaetz was on national television delivering a broadside against the men he still alleges extorted his family, while at the same time describing a series of events that FBI records show wasn’t accurate," The Beast reports.
Asked for comment about the discrepancy between what Gaetz told Fox viewers and what the FBI report detailed, a spokesperson for the lawmaker issued a statement that read, "Rep. Matt Gaetz stands by every word he has said about this fiasco. Time has only vindicated his claims and resulted in the guilty plea of one of the people involved in a shakedown of his family,” the spokesperson said. “Due to ongoing investigations of other people involved in this shakedown, we will not have further comment.”
Gaetz is still reportedly still under investigation by federal and Florida state officials.
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