UK teen gets 11.5 years for hate-speech videos linked to Buffalo, Colorado mass shootings
A British teenager who posted far-right videos that have been linked to mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Colorado Springs, Colo., was sentenced to 11 1/2 years on terrorism-related charges in the United Kingdom on Friday, the BBC reported.
Daniel Harris, 19, was convicted in December of five counts of encouraging terrorism and one count of possession of material for terrorist purposes for attempting to make a gun with a 3D printer.
Harris’s online posts — which Judge Patrick Field reportedly described as espousing “vile antisemitic, racist, misogynistic and homophobic views” — were shared online by Payton Gendron, who has pleaded guilty to fatally shooting 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket last May.
The British teenager’s videos, which called for the “total extermination of subhumans,” have also been linked to Anderson Lee Aldrich, who is accused of killing five people and injuring 25 more in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs in November.
“What they did was truly appalling, but what they did was no more than you intended to encourage others to do when publishing this material online,” Field said at Harris’s sentencing on Friday, according to CNN.
“You intended to encourage terrorism, and it’s plain that what was being encouraged was lethal, racist and anti-Semitic violence, as well as violence against the gay community,” Field added, calling Harris’s posts a “stream of rightwing terrorist bile.”
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