Chris York reports:

Ten people lay dead and a teenager armed with an assault rifle and a written tirade promoting white supremacy had been arrested. Yet just hours after the horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, a small corner of the internet was trying to pin the blame nearly 5,000 miles away, in Ukraine.

The link was tenuous at best: A photo of the shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, shows him wearing clothing emblazoned with a “sonnenrad,” a neo–Nazi symbol also known as the Black Sun.

In Ukraine, a regiment of the country’s armed forces with ties to the far right called the Azov battalion previously used the symbol when it was an independent paramilitary group. But Azov dropped the symbol after it was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard and its controversial founder left the group.

And that was it. The 180-page manifesto that Gendron wrote before his attack never mentions Azov, and there is no evidence the two have ever met or communicated. Or even that Gendron has visited Ukraine. In fact the diatribe, uploaded to the online forum 8Chan, indicated that, like a lot of white supremacists in America and Europe, Gendron supports Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Nevertheless, the sonnenrad was sufficient evidence for a handful of American commentators who, with the help of Russian state media and top-level Russian diplomats, used it to make the case that U.S. military assistance and aid to embattled Ukraine was actually funding white supremacy.

Aaron Maté, whose conspiracy theories about Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack in Douma in 2018 have been highlighted by the Russian government at the United Nations, tried to cement the supposed link between Gendron and Azov, claiming it was “awkward” as it showed the U.S. was “allying with neo-Nazis” in order to “use Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia.” Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s first deputy permanent representative to the U.N., was more than happy to amplify this non sequitur to exploit an American atrocity. On Twitter, Benjamin Norton compared it to the “blowback” of funding Afghan militants who would later form al Qaeda. And Glenn Greenwald, a Substack columnist, retweeted another journalist, also trying to link Azov to the Buffalo shooting.

“What it appears to be is a disingenuous attempt to use the Buffalo shooting to undermine support for arming Ukraine, sending aid to Ukraine and helping them to defend themselves against Russian aggression,” behavioral scientist and disinformation researcher Caroline Orr tells New Lines.

So where should the focus be when looking at the inspiration of Gendron? Uncomfortably for the U.S. journalists mentioned, a lot closer to home than Ukraine.

For starters, an insight into the preferred news sites favored by Gendron can be gleaned from the fact that the manifesto he wrote referenced two websites read by the anti-imperialist left, Mintpress News and Jacobin Magazine. Mintpress has been accused of promoting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and also regularly pushes pro-Russian propaganda, most notably the unfounded claim that a 2013 chemical weapon attack in Syria that killed more than 1,400 people was perpetrated not by the Syrian regime but by rebel groups with weapons supplied by Saudi Arabia.

Mintpress News, alongside The Grayzone, which Maté writes for, has continued to publish Russian-backed narratives that the Syrian regime has been framed for further chemical weapon attacks during the years-long war in the country. The sources of both websites’ funding are unknown. [Continue reading…]