Jacksonville shooter’s manifesto is full of racism and homophobia

The manifesto of a gunman who killed three Black people in Florida is littered with extreme racism, homophobia and transphobia. 

On 26 August 2023, 21-year-old 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. at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, before killing himself. 

He used Glock handgun and an AR-15-style rifle, according to local police.

On Friday (19 January), the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office released Palmeter’s manifesto, which sheriff T.K. Waters described in a statement as the “rantings of an isolated, hateful, madman” whose “disgusting ideology is wholly inconsistent with the belief structure of the Jacksonville community”. 

The manifesto has been released to the public as it no longer poses an “investigative hindrance”, in a move the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office describes as “consistent with our commitment to transparency”. 

The 27-page document – which is written in comic sans font to apparently irritate the reader – is riddled with horrific racism, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia in the form of slurs, conspiracy theories, false science and threats of violence. 

In the disgusting manifesto, the Black community is described as a “wild beast in need of culling”. The shooter also writes that a “civilised society” should see Black people “deported and exterminated”. 

Palmeter goes on to state in the deranged document that the “single root cause for the advanced societal decay” in Western society is “the deadliest symptoms” – which he claims are Black and LGBTQ+ people.

He says LGBTQ+ folks “deserve extermination just as much as” Black people and they will “both fall by my hand, and the day will come when civilised people of the world band together to follow my actions”. 

Palmeter also claimed that the Supreme Court’s ruling on equal marriage was the beginning of a “slippery slope” that allowed gay and trans people to use children as sexual objects. 

This viewpoint echoes the far-right ‘groomer’ conspiracy theory that LGBTQ+ people are actively out to harm children, simply because they are LGBTQ+. 

Also in the document, Palmeter makes pernicious references to people of other races, suggesting that Arab and Latinx folks are by “no means peers of the white man”. 

In a Q&A section in included in his manifesto, Palmeter also goes on to make vile jokes about rape, suggests methods of killing Black people and describes wanting to kill Eminem and Machine Gun Kelly.

In a statement provided to local news outlets, former FBI agent Alex Silverstein labelled Palmeter’s ramblings as “madness”.

Silverstein said: “One of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s not one single profile for anyone who does these mass attacks.

“There are things that they share in common, sometimes there’s some sort of grievance that they have against society, whatever, whether that grievance is based in rational thought or irrational thought, but there’s some sort of grievance.

“There’s some sort of fantasy that goes on about what this attack will achieve.”

“We try to understand what was going through this person’s mind. But also remember, we’re looking at it through a lens of logic. As we sit here afterward, we look back on the things that we could have seen. But in fact, the person who’s responsible for this is the person who carried out the attacks.”

Anyone who has witnessed or experienced a hate crime is urged to call the police on 101, Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or visit the True Vision website. In an emergency, always dial 999.