For years before William Edward Atchison killed two students and himself, he lived a shadow life onlineone full of crude alt-right memes and praise for school shooters.
BEN COLLINS
12.15.17 5:00 AM ET
In real life, William Edward Atchisonpeople called him Billlived in a little yellow house with his parents, about a mile away from the Giant gas station where he worked and from Aztec High School, where he shot and killed two students and then himself last Thursday.
At the murder scene, police found a thumb drive with a note that read, If things go according to plan, today would be when I die. I go somewhere and gear up, then hold a class hostage and go apeshit, then blow my brains out.
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And yet online, the 21-year-old New Mexico resident lived a prolific life as a white supremacist, pro-Trump meme peddler who was most known for his obsession with school shooters. For a half-decade, Atchison spent most of his days online, repeatedly posting threats of violence and cries for help.
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Despite local law enforcements claims that he wasnt a known threat, and a visit from the FBI in 2016, Atchison spent most of the last half-decade glorifying school shooters on alt-right websites and posting plaintive appeals for help in fixing his life, according to hundreds of posts analyzed by The Daily Beast.
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On the alt-right forums and hate groups he frequented, Atchison appears to have made many enemies. Despite later becoming a moderator of the site, one of Atchisons most popular EncyclopediaDramatica accounts, AlGore, was banned from the site for two years when it was labeled as a troll.
And in the run-up to the 2016 election, EncyclopediaDramatica users excoriated Atchison for abusing his powers as a SysOp of the site. Users were upset he was appending too many pro-Columbine shooting memes and ****** facebook commentaries praising Donald Trump on the sites home page.
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Atchison even spread his affinity for school shootings and Nazi ideology in more sanitized parts of the web.
On Steam, an online video game store and community, Atchison used the reviews section to criticize Wolfenstein games, which are set in World War II-era Germany.
I find this game highly offensive for featuring mass murder against your own race, he wrote. In another review, he simply wrote, RIP Hitler.
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And his recent posts reflected what seems to be a migration from trolling to honest espousal of an extreme right-wing political ideology.
In November, Atchison wrote on Steam, How am I supposed to function in this world? Wherever I go, I see degeneracy. Pointless materialism, hedonism, sexual decay, dirty n**gers who do nothing but slowly break down this society etc. its ****ing everywhere. No way to escape it, 99% of people are part of it and whatever I do I am confronted with the death of the West. Go to the store and buy groceries in peace? Nope, heres a group of LGBT liberal filth in line with you. And theres a n**ger family with 10 kids over there. And a Finn too, but hes overweight as **** and hes buying alcohol and **** junk food. ****ing fantastic.
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On YouTube, Atchison admitted he posted anonymously on pro-Trump, white-supremacist sites like 4chans /pol/ board or The Daily Stormer, but gave up when domain registrars kept shutting down The Daily Stormers domain names. He, along with most of The Daily Stormers community, said the sites were shoad, an anti-Semitic slur.
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Atchison had also posted on Blockland.us, a forum for the Minecraft-like multiplayer video game, since 2014. His more than 40 usernames were meant to offend. Almost all were racist or violent by design.
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What weve found with these ideologies is that they repeatedly lead to violence. Theres a dual line of radicalization happening, said Lenz. To steep yourself in Daily Stormer rhetoric and the sites like it is to put yourself in the headspace of where the violence is when not if.
In his final days, Atchison used Sam Hyde as his display name, the name alt-right users on websites like 4chan and Twitter employ in an effort to dupe the media into sharing false information after mass shootings.
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Acting on a tip that Atchison had posted a comment on a gaming forum asking users where he could get a cheap assault rifle for a mass shooting, the FBI interviewed him and his family, and ultimately determined that no crime had been committed and closed the investigation.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-m...ecret-life-on-pro-trump-white-supremacy-sites
