Police in Tennessee are investigating whether an antisemitic manifesto posted online was written by a teenager accused of carrying out a fatal school shooting in Nashville on Wednesday.
The alleged shooter at Antioch High School appears to have posted a livestream of the shooting as well as content on his social media accounts prior to the attack, in which one student was killed. The material was removed after its connection to the shooting became known.
According to The Tennessean newspaper, the materials attributed to the shooter, identified as Solomon Henderson, included statements praising Adolf Hitler and opposing “race-mixing,” as well as materials related to past school shootings, including a deadly one at a Nashville Christian school in 2023. Authorities say Henderson, a 17-year-old student at Antioch, killed himself during the incident after fatally shooting another.
“Our analysts located a sprawling manifesto full of anti-Black content, references to accelerationism and antisemitism,” Carla Hill of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the newspaper. “It also plagiarized from various far right manifestos and publications, including Terrorgram Collective and a manifesto by Matthew Harris.”
Harris is a former philosophy instructor who was arrested in 2022 for making a mass shooting threat against the University of California, Los Angeles, where he had worked. Harris, who is Black, posted an 800-page manifesto that included explicit calls for violence against Jews and white people. The Terrorgram Collective is a white supremacist group whose leaders were arrested in September.
The alleged shooter at Antioch High School is also Black; according to local media reports, the materials seen as likely to have been posted by him said the writer was “ashamed to be Black.” The reports said the content also included a poster for the Goyim Defense League, whose members distribute antisemitic propaganda, and a declaration that “Candace Owens influenced me above all each time she spoke.” Owens is a Black far-right commentator who has embraced antisemitism.
Henderson was allegedly radicalized online. “These online spaces not only glorify violent fantasies, extremist ideologies, and mass killers but also fuel offline violence — acts that are often as incomprehensible as the ideologies that drive them,” Oren Segal, VP of the ADL Center on Extremism, said in a statement.
The Tennessee shooting adds to a long list of incidents apparently carried out by people who have been radicalized online by far-right movements. They include the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 Jews were murdered at prayer; a 2019 synagogue shooting in Germany that was livestreamed; and mass killings in Buffalo, New York; Texas; and New Zealand by shooters who posted about their belief in the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
The streaming platform Kick said it had removed footage from an attack in Nashville that it said was “partially livestreamed” on its platform. “KICK rapidly banned the account and removed the video. Violence has no place on KICK,” the company tweeted. “We are actively working with law enforcement and taking all appropriate steps to support their investigation.”
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