After California Synagogue Shooting, 8Chan Is Back In the Spotlight

On Saturday, news broke that a gunman had opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, a suburb of San Diego, California. One woman, Lori Gilbert Kaye, was killed in the shooting after leaping in front of the congregation’s rabbi to protect him from gunfire; the rabbi and two other people also suffered injuries.

The attack bore striking similarity to other recent attacks on houses of worship, including the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, which took the lives of at least 49 worshippers. And despite right-wing commentators’ insistence that the attack was perpetuated by a so-called “lone wolf” who had no connection whatsoever to other racially motivated acts of domestic terrorism, the similarities were immediately cemented with the arrest of a 19-year-old man, who had authored a manifesto explicitly stating that he was inspired by both the Pittsburgh and Christchurch shootings. The manifesto bore striking stylistic and structural similarities to the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, referencing the same Extremely Online in-jokes, linking to the same document-uploading websites and promising to livestream the attack (in the Poway shooter’s case, this effort was apparently unsuccessful). Most significantly, both the Christchurch shooter and the Poway synagogue shooter posted their notes on the same board on 8chan, an online image board widely known as a hotbed of racist and anti-Semitic thought.

“It’s reasonable to assume it’s a copycat manifesto,” says Keegan Hankes, a research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Robert Evans, an investigative journalist who writes for the digital investigative platform Bellingcat, goes one step further, referring to both the Christchurch and Poway synagogue shootings as “act[s] of inspirational terrorism.” “Its goal was to inspire people” to commit violent, hate-fueled acts, he tells Rolling Stone.

8chan’s longstanding reputation as a respite for internet trolls is deeply woven into its origins: the website was founded after the message board 4/chan (itself known as a hotbed for anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynistic rhetoric) started cracking down on Gamergaters and child porn distributors. While not every poster or community on 8chan is explicitly violent or anti-Semitic or racist, over the past few years the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) board, on which the Christchurch and Poway synagogue shooters both posted their manifestos, has emerged as a hotbed of white supremacist thought and, increasingly, calls to violent action. “When something horrifying happens online that leads people to say, ‘the internet is a terrible place,” they are often talking about something that was planned on 8chan,” Splinter News wrote of the website back in 2016.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/poway-synagogue-shooting-8chan-white-supremacist-828647/