Two things inevitably follow a mass shooting. For one, the shooter becomes a celebrity. I don’t like it any more than you do but there’s something about evil that great that draws people into wanting to know more. Why did they do it? What drove them there? What kind of lens did they see the world through? All of these questions course through the minds of anyone who hears about killers.

The other inevitability is that it will immediately be looked at by politicians, media figures, and activists as tools. One should never let a crisis go to waste, and true to form, everyone from gun control advocates to race-baiters will show up in full force, ready to make the deaths of innocents about their favored cause.

On Twitter, as I write this and you read it, the Buffalo shooter is the subject of a lot of the national conversation and there are a lot of people pointing fingers at their political opposites for the blame. This is going on despite the fact that the shooter made information readily available online about his beliefs and intentions.

Grabien founder Tom Elliott decided to take a moment and post a very easy thread that shows the Buffalo killer’s thought process about everything from how we wanted to execute the shooting to what his beliefs are and where he got them from.

It starts with why he chose the location he did. New York is very adamant about gun control and the shooter knew that he’d have an advantage there since everyone around him would have a very limited ammo capacity.

We also learn about his love of fascism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism.

Buffalo killer says he’s a fascist, racist, and proud anti-Semite pic.twitter.com/YE8aEGqI1G

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 16, 2022

But before we come to the conclusion that this kid was just an extremist conservative as the media would have you believe, we can see the shooter made it very clear that he’s actually more of a socialist and “wants no part” of conservatism. In fact, his views evolved from communism and he said he’d define himself as a leftist populist.

Buffalo killer says his views evolved from “communist ideology” and says he now "falls in the mild-moderate authoritarian left
category, and I would prefer to be called a populist” pic.twitter.com/r6rjTeUrl2

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 16, 2022

While I won’t post the rest of the thread here, it is easily accessible as Elliot posts more, and it continues by giving us quite a bit of info. The shooter believes himself to be an “eco-fascist” who is very concerned about the erasure of whites and their culture through immigration and seems to have been a heavy user of 4Chan, where posts he found there refined his beliefs.

He posted that he is very anti-libertarian, believing that it’s a Jewish idea. He thanks God that conservatism is dead and wishes for the death of “anti-white” capitalists.

It’s clear that the shooter drifted towards Nazism and thought that a more “Hitleresque” nation was the best way to go. Neither the right nor the left embrace that. It is interesting to note all of this, and know where he got his ideas from directly from the source, but it’s also important to remember that sometimes, it’s those around him that can give us an even clearer picture.

As Joe Cunningham wrote, people who knew him said the shooter was always very bizarre and strange. His behavior was always off and he seemed very fascinated with extremist ideologies. The testimony of those who knew him is enough to have you focus less on his beliefs and more on his mental illness, which is clearly a factor here.

(READ: In Buffalo, We See the Effects of Ignoring the Mental Health Crisis Among Our Children)

That’s not to say that his ravings weren’t an important glimpse into his mental state, but all of this together creates a picture of an angry young man who didn’t get the help he clearly needed, and just like we see at the end of most mass shootings, we’re seeing more of an embrace of the surface level ideologies than the fact that mental health was the primary factor.