Jacksonville shooter’s racist manifesto also contained vile anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric

Today, Jacksonville, Florida, Sheriff T.K. Waters released the manifesto of the 21-year-old white man who gunned down three Black people at a Dollar General store last August in a mass shooting motivated by both racism and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred.

On August 26, the gunman, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, shot and killed 52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, 29-year-old Jerrald Gallion, and 19-year-old Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., in and around a Jacksonville Dollar General before killing himself.

Related:

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She has spent years accusing LGBTQ people of mutilating kids and threatening civilization.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Waters told the media that the killer had left multiple “manifestos” addressed to his family, the media, and “federal agents,” and that his journals detailed his “disgusting ideology of hate.”

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“This shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people,” Waters said of the gunman at an August news conference. “He targeted a certain group a people, and that’s Black people, that’s what he said he wanted to kill. And that’s very clear.”

In a statement released alongside the manifesto on Friday, Waters noted that the release of the document no longer poses an “investigative hindrance,” and that in releasing it, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office remains “consistent with our commitment to transparency.”

“Members of the public deserve to determine, firsthand, that this manifesto is filled with the rantings of an isolated, hateful, madman whose disgusting ideology is wholly inconsistent with the belief structure of the Jacksonville community,” Waters said. “As our city heals from this tragedy, let us continue to stand united.”

The 27-page document — written entirely in Comic Sans font, itself an apparent act of spite — is lousy with racial and anti-LGBTQ+ slurs, conspiracy theories, junk “science,” misinformation, misreadings of history, and calls for violence. It should come as no surprise that alongside his viciously racist ramblings, the killer states his intention to kill “a bunch of” LGBTQ+ people.  

LGBTQ+ people, he writes, “deserve extermination just as much as” Black people. “They will both fall by my hand, and the day will come when civilized people of the world band together to follow my actions.”

The gunman describes both Black and LGBTQ+ people as “the deadliest symptoms” of “advanced societal decay,” and asserts that the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage was the beginning of a “slippery slope” leading to LGBTQ+ people being allowed to “warp our children into their fetish toys.”

Notably, the gunman’s disgusting words echo anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, particularly the false “groomer” narrative, that has been pushed by prominent Republican politicians like Florida Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO), and influential social media figures like Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik.