9 people were killed in a mass shooting at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, and a car accident the next day, and the reaction to these events reflected a certain euphoria and schadenfreude among the right-wing media. Then we learned that one of the victims had a patch on his vest that said "R-W-D-S" on it.
00:00:00.000Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my journal. I hope you are doing well.
00:00:09.240Well, we had a rather depressing weekend, and I don't think it was necessarily personally depressing,
00:00:18.880but it was certainly depressing in terms of the news and how we think of ourselves as a country.
00:00:28.180Speaking from an American standpoint, I guess you could also say that it was depressing in terms of how other people think of America.
00:00:41.600We witnessed two rather shocking events.
00:00:49.840First, there was a mass shooting that left nine dead.
00:00:56.500I think there are additional others who are in critical condition at a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, which is north of Dallas.
00:01:07.620This was followed swiftly the next morning by a car accident that might very well have been a car attack.
00:01:17.460The person who did this is named Jorge Alvarez.
00:01:22.620So there were two Hispanic males, both involved in things that are terrifying.
00:01:31.440School shootings and spree shootings are nothing new, and as depressing, I mean, that word again, as it might be,
00:01:46.900you could just chalk it all up to mental illness and social contagion and alienation and the availability of dangerous guns in the country, etc.
00:02:03.880But with both of these attacks, there seemed to be something more.
00:02:08.840So immediately after the attack occurred in Allen, Texas, I noticed on my Twitter feed that there were...
00:05:11.560The first time I ever heard that phrase was not 2016, when that phrase was passed around Twitter on the alt-right.
00:05:24.180You know, obviously, it was an extremely outlandish and outrageous rhetoric that predominated.
00:05:31.480But I actually heard it out of the mouth of Ann Coulter.
00:05:35.660She was actually speaking at CPAC in 2014.
00:05:42.280CPAC's, of course, the conservative gathering held every year, held multiple times a year, I think.
00:05:47.700And she said, conservatives should make it clear to Republicans that if they pass amnesty, they're going on to the death squad with the people who wrecked America.
00:06:01.360That, of course, got huge applause from the crowd.
00:06:07.400I can remember, I think I was actually in Washington at the time.
00:06:12.120And I was with a number of other right-wing types.
00:06:17.980And everyone was like, oh, you know, based, that kind of thing.
00:06:21.820So what she was saying, effectively, and obviously she was using tough talk and, you know, outrageous language.
00:06:29.560But what she was basically saying is that the Republicans pass amnesty.
00:06:34.880We're going to put them in a death squad.
00:06:37.120I think she meant that we're going to put them to death.
00:06:40.600So, again, that meme, I heard it first from Ann Coulter.
00:06:44.980But the meme was passed around quite a bit on Twitter after that.
00:06:53.800I think in that sense, it was more of a death squad of a group of right-wingers who were going to go kill, you know, who knows, the evil liberals who did this or illegal immigrants or whatever.
00:07:08.300And it is also kind of referenced to Pinochet and his attacks on his leftist enemies.
00:07:16.980So what was that patch doing on the vest of Garcia?
00:07:44.120And the more we learn about Garcia, the more I think this was not just a kind of narcissistic mass shooting like we saw in Columbine being the paradigm.
00:08:00.200Of, you know, we're alienated from this school and we're going to go out in a blaze of glory and get revenge against the jocks and the cheerleaders who oppressed us.
00:08:20.040But it was mostly theatrical and narcissistic.
00:08:24.200What seems to be suggested by what we learn about Mauricio Garcia is that he was engaged in a kind of terrorism.
00:08:40.960That is, he was engaged in a political act for a political end.
00:08:44.320Even if it were nihilistic and led to his own death, it was still trying to accomplish something or at the very least send a message.
00:08:57.400So once more research was done, we learned that that does seem to be the case.
00:09:06.600That he seems to have been motivated by right-wing politics.
00:09:10.860And of course, on Sunday, on Twitter, you know, I mentioned that I saw that kind of schadenfreude, if that's the right term, regarding an immigrant killer.
00:09:24.420They then went to a different mode, which is, you know, why is the mainstream media claiming that this guy's a white supremacist?
00:09:33.260How could he possibly be a white supremacist?
00:09:35.920And, you know, I think a lot of that, almost this, they, the conservatives are kind of obsessed with the idea of a narrative that's being put forward by the liberals.
00:09:48.140And for good reason, in many ways, I think, you know, all media is kind of storytelling, narrative making.
00:09:53.860But they take it so far to the extent that it's almost like there's no reality here that this was some gang shooting over drugs.
00:10:06.180But because those mean old liberals hate conservatives so much, they're going to turn it, they're going to turn Garcia into a conservative or something.
00:10:14.760Well, the more and more we learn about Garcia, the more clear it becomes that he actually was motivated by this kind of ideology.
00:10:30.160So I'm just going to read a little bit.
00:10:33.120This is from a report in the New York Times from today.
00:10:36.600After Texas mall shooting, searching for motive and grieving for children.
00:10:40.660Investigators trying to learn why a gunman fatally shot at least eight people at a Texas mall or examining a social media profile rife with hate-filled rants against women and black people that they believe belonged to the gunman.
00:10:56.880The profile found on the social media site OKRU matches the gunman's birthday and refers to a motel where he was staying before the shooting.
00:11:06.440The profile also includes language praising Hitler with references to neo-Nazi websites like the Daily Stormer.
00:11:13.940On Sunday afternoon, officials identified the gunman who was killed at the time, Marcio Garcia.
00:11:19.280The motive for the attack remains unclear.
00:11:51.680Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about that site later.
00:11:54.120But he says he was says this is according to the shooter himself, says he was radicalized through reading American Renaissance and V-Dare, then meeting a white nationalist in the army.
00:12:08.640He was in the army and he was actually discharged at some point for a mental illness.
00:12:12.520He laughs at the fact that non-whites can be racist, too, adding gotcha, says he walked around with an it's OK to be white T-shirt.
00:12:27.380It actually gets worse or more interesting, depending on your perspective.
00:12:33.440He actually wrote a post claiming that he was inspired by libs of Tick Tock.
00:12:41.240That's, of course, this extremely popular Twitter account that basically post videos, as the name implies, from Tick Tock.
00:12:51.160They're crazy leftists talking about gender and all that kind of nonsense.
00:12:56.660They also found a picture of the apparently the shooter.
00:13:04.580Now, it's his head is out of the photo, so we can't be sure.
00:13:09.480But it is a man that seemingly looks like them.
00:13:13.400It's an Hispanic male and he has a Texas tattoo on his shoulder.
00:13:16.820And then he also has kind of lightning bolt SS like tattoo and a swastika on his left pectoral.
00:13:24.260It's actually quite reminiscent of a tattoo that is on the body of Weave, Andrew Algermeyer, who has the same tattoo.
00:13:36.480It's a tattoo that was made famous or infamous from the movie with Edward Norton, American History X, where he had that on his chest.
00:13:48.240Again, according to his OKRU account, he was reading The Daily Stormer.
00:13:53.120So who knows what we can make of this?
00:13:57.780Now, there's some interesting questions that we can go into.
00:14:05.660First off, what one might be, what motivated him to do this or what really motivated him to enter into right wing, extreme right ideology?
00:14:18.940Now, I think a lot of leftist and liberals assume that it is the books and websites and Twitter accounts and just, you know, easy answer giving hate mongering ideology that creates these types of people.
00:14:40.820So if we could maybe perhaps censor the web or curate content or at least debunk content that's coming from Amran or Vidair or, you know, The Daily Stormer, much worse, or crazy anonymous accounts, etc.
00:15:06.020We could just kind of censor this or at the very least debunk it.
00:15:10.400We could prevent people from falling prey to this.
00:15:15.680So it's a kind of prey and predator-like dynamic in that mind.
00:15:18.940Now, you could flip that around and say that people who are already mentally ill are attracted to extreme right positions.
00:15:33.060Actually, in his book, which I worked on and published, called Spiteful Mutants, Ed Dutton writes about this, and he actually does reach that second conclusion,
00:15:44.700that, you know, in previous times when we lived in much more conservative or authoritarian or even feudal societies, the way to upset the apple cart would be to be a radical egalitarian or social leveler, etc.
00:16:04.520And to a very large degree, that's still the case.
00:16:09.620You know, you think of the stereotype of the alienated goth teenager who, you know, becomes a communist or something like that.