Unless you've been hiding under a rock, which
these days doesn't seem to be a bad idea at all, you know about
the mass shootings in the US over the weekend of August 3-4, 2019: the first in El Paso, Texas and the second
in Dayton, Ohio. In other words:
just another weekend in Trumpistan. And with those
shootings have come another hundred rounds of conspiranoid babble
to distract from the real problems of gun violence, right-wing extremism/hate-mongering, and, of course, "the
Trump effect." Meanwhile,
politicians, police, pundits, and the public are hyper-focused on
manifestos and social media posts that raise far more questions
than they answer.
Dueling conspiracy tales: pick one or both
From the moment that the stories of the shootings first broke,
the fake news -- and I mean the actual fake news, not
"fake news" by Trumpian definitions -- was out in force
on the Interwebz. Rolling Stone published a pretty good summary on August 5, noting that toxic tongues on the right
really commenced wagging when it came out that the Dayton shooter
had appeared to be a leftist.
Based on these reported leftist bona
fides, right-wing pundits immediately began speculating that
the Dayton shooter was a member of antifa. But aside from a
retweet of an antifa account, his Twitter does not contain
any references to antifascist activity; nor did he appear to
engage in any local antifa action, which would be expected in
Dayton, an antifascist hotspot, says Emily Gorcenski, a
far-right researcher and creator of First Vigil, which tracks
far-right extremism in the United States. “Typically what
we see is antifascist activists in they’re mostly focused
on their local issues. The folks in Portland they talk about
Portland; the folks in D.C. talk about D.C.,” says
Gorcenski. “He didn’t talk about any antifascist
activities.”
On the same day that the Rolling Stone piece
was posted, BuzzFeed News published an article along the same lines, summarizing the disinfo and noting that it's part of
an ongoing pattern.
During a breaking news situation,
there’s often a scramble to understand what happened, and
details can change as more information comes to light. But
there’s little doubt that campaigns to misinform the public
during a critical time are intentional and use similar
tactics from year to year.
From what I've seen in my rudimentary research,
there have been two main categories of conspiranoid codswallop
regarding these two shootings. Neither narrative is in any way
original. Some folks lean towards one, some folks prefer the
other, some enthusiastically embrace both. In conspiracyville
it's always a free-for-all. But like pretty much all conspiracy
tales, what both of these have in common is that they are an
expression of a stubborn refusal to accept anything that
the mainstream news media report (Donald Trump seems to be making
this phenomenon much worse and more widespread, though the problem precedes and transcends Trump). This utter refusal to accept the "official"
story is generally accompanied by a fierce desire to turn every
horrible event into a whodunit.
Theory 1: Antifa done it (per Alex Jones,
Dan Patrick, and random Trumpsters (not to mention Trump himself))
I've blogged a bunch about conspiracy-porn purveyor and
right-wingnut Alex Jones, who resides in my
fair state of Texas but spreads his toxins all over the world via
the Internet. He's pretty consistent and quite predictable with
his responses to mass shootings, almost always declaring them to
either be a false flag (to advance the interests of gun control
advocates and other demonic liberals), or an outright hoax (for
the same purposes as the alleged false flags), or both. Although he has gotten himself in a lot of legal hot water by
mouthing off about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre being a hoax, that hasn't stopped him from continuing to spew in the
wake of subsequent mass shootings. (For that matter, his legal
troubles apparently haven't stopped him (or possibly his legal
team) from allegedly harassing some of the Sandy Hook parents.)
Jones did not disappoint when responding to the El Paso shooting,
and in fact he and another right-wingnut and shame of the Lone
Star State, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, sounded a lot alike in their rhetoric, as noted in an August 4 piece on Media Matters. Not only had they often used language about immigrants
of color that is similar to language used in a white-supremacist
manifesto attributed to the El Paso gunman, but they also tried
to use upcoming antifa protests in the city to derail the story
of the shooting.
According to ABC News,
the gunman told law enforcement after being taken into
custody that “he wanted to shoot as many Mexicans as
possible.”
But in the wake of the shooting, both Patrick and Jones
pivoted to the boogeyman of “antifa” to distract from the obvious fact
that the gunman was inspired by right-wing rhetoric about
Latinos and immigration.
Even while media reports on the mass shooting remained hazy,
Patrick called into
Fox News on August 3 and said, “You know, I was looking at
a story recently…where Antifa is posting, you know they
want to come down to El Paso and do a 10-day siege. Clear
message to Antifa: Stay out of El Paso.” Andy Ngo, an editor of
right-wing website Quillette, has recently drawn attention
to the upcoming anti-fascism protests, which call for the
abolishment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency.
Jones, who is based out of Austin, TX, pushed similar claims
in a video posted to his Infowars website on August 4. After
suggesting that the El Paso mass shooting was possibly a false flag attack carried out by leftists -- typical fare
for Jones in the wake of
violent tragedies -- the Infowars host suggested the shooting
may have been staged to help the anti-fascism protests [video
link is in the article ~ CC].
"Antifa" -- short for
"anti-fascist" -- has become one of the favorite
scapegoats of the right, ranking right up there with Black Lives
Matter and George Soros. But "antifa" is not a unified organization, any more than Black Lives Matter is. And George Soros is neither the antichrist nor the universal funder of everything
that the wingnuts claim he is. Antifa
(and BLM, and Soros) are all just convenient scapegoats used by lazy or cynical right-wing conspiranoids who don't want to face up to real problems and threats -- in this case, the perennial problems of gun violence and racism (or possibly misogyny, in the case of the Ohio shooter).
None of these nuances and complexities have stopped the amateur analysts on social
media from positing an antifa false-flag conspiracy behind both
the Ohio and the Texas shootings, with some claiming to have
predicted such a thing years ago, when the word
"antifa" first popped up on their radar. According to
some of these narratives, antifa, like suicide bombers, willingly
sacrifice a few of their own to the greater cause.
Theory 2: The Deep State done it (per Mike "The Health
Ranger" Adams and random Trumpsters)
I've also churned out tons of content about conspiracy
peddler, alt-right ranter/Trump fan, and alt-health frauducts
pusher Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams. Not surprisingly, Adams has expounded on the latest
mass shootings, which he suggests are an FBI plot. Here's a link to the lunacy.
Let's unpack it a bit.
Adams opens by claiming that the El Paso and Dayton shootings
follow the pattern of "FBI terror plots" that he says
were documented by the New York Times and the Kansas
City Star as being created and carried out by FBI agents. He
doesn't really do justice to his argument by citing stories from
both of those papers about FBI mock terrorism drills. But he does
attempt to bolster his premise by writing that the two shootings
were initiated in the hours following the "bombshell
revelation that the FBI conspired with Hillary Clinton and the
Obama administration to destroy Clinton's email hard drives as a
means to eliminate any evidence of Hillary Clinton's prosecutable
crimes." The source for the claim about the "bombshell
revelation" is an article on the rabid rightwing online mag, Frontpage, which links to no other external sources. Frontpage is listed on the Media Bias site as a
questionable source with extreme-right bias. It has failed numerous fact checks and is a great
promoter of conspiracy theories, particularly those involving
Islam.
Adams continues:
Former FBI director
James Comey is now known
to have run multiple criminal schemes to illegally frame
Trump administration officials while clearing Obama-era
officials as part of a treasonous deep state plot to
overthrow the United States of America, defeat President
Trump and frame Trump supporters as domestic terrorists.
It now appears abundantly obvious that the FBI is the most
prolific terrorist organization in America, and this fact has
been confirmed by the New York Times. Under the treasonous
command of Barack Obama and James Comey, the FBI was
radicalized and weaponized into a treasonous crime syndicate
that routinely plotted and carried out acts of terrorism
against the United States of America, all while covering up
the damning evidence of criminality and treason that should
have sent Hillary Clinton to prison.
The FBI is running a massive, coordinated psyop on America.
The goal is to demonize all Trump supporters, paint illegals
aliens as victims and enraged [sic] the
mind-controlled Left to the point of a mass armed
insurrection led by Antifa terrorists (i.e. civil war). The
deep state knows it is about to be exposed by Trump, Durham
and William Barr, so it is running every “Hail Mary”
operation imaginable to try to control the minds of the
masses and depict Trump supporters as enemies of civil
society.
All righty, then.
Just to show that he's really an on-the-ball, cutting-edge
thinker who refuses to believe what the "fake news"
media tell him, Mikey poses a list of "simple questions" that he claims
blow apart the official accounts of the El Paso shooting. He acknowledges that the shooting was real, and that
people really were shot and killed, but insists the narrative
surrounding the tragedy is "almost all fiction."
Several of the questions Adams asks are based on dodgy premises,
such as this one:
If the shooter is on a suicide mission,
why does he bother to wear both eye protection and ear
protection? Answer: Because he knows he will survive his
“mission” and be taken into custody after surrendering to
police. It wasn’t a suicide mission at all. Eighteen months
from now, the world will have forgotten the name of the
shooter, and the media will never report anything about him
again. (He will likely be relocated under the witness
protection program, living under a new identity after having
completed his “mission” for the deep state.)
There's no indication that the El Paso shooter
was actually on a suicide mission. The writer of the four-page
manifesto (who may or may not have been the shooter) said he
would most likely die in his efforts to take back his country
from the "invaders," but he didn't express a desire to
die, and in fact cautioned his fellow warriors against attacking
well-armed opponents such as police. He said it was better to go
for the low-hanging fruit -- unarmed immigrants, for instance --
so that one could live to fight another day.
Adams also takes issue with apparently contradictory early
accounts of the number of shooters. But news media, always
anxious to be Johnny-on-the-spot (or journo-on-the-spot) often
get details wrong in the initial confusion surrounding an event
like these shootings.
Adams also writes:
If you hate illegals and want to
protect America, why would you mass murder Americans
shopping in an American store? Wouldn’t
you theoretically want to target illegal aliens if that’s who you want to destroy?
Nearly all the people who were shot were Americans. It makes no
sense to hate illegals and then turn around and mass murder
Americans.
Well, now, that's either gaslighting, trolling, or
just plain lack of comprehension. I would hate to think that
Adams is actually as stupid as he thinks his readers are, because
that would mean that I am making fun of stupid people, which
isn't nice, not that this has ever stopped me. Anyway, the
manifesto indicated a dislike of Hispanics regardless of whether
or not they were US citizens. The shooter himself (who, again,
may or may not be the person who wrote the manifesto) is reported
to have told law enforcement that he was out to shoot as many
"Mexicans" as possible. He seemed to have deliberately
traveled to an area with a majority population of Hispanics, and
to a store that was frequented not only by Hispanics who are US
citizens but also by Mexican citizens traveling over the border
to shop. Ethnicity rather than citizenship appeared to be the
main criterion for the shooter.
Adams also expresses suspicion about a MyLife profile on the
shooter that "leftists" supposedly changed from
"Democrat" to "Republican/Trump supporter"
etc. Here's the skinny on that. It
appears that the suspect in the El Paso shooting didn't even have
a profile on MyLife until one was created after the shooting, and
then it appears that the public started playing games with the
profile.
Adams concludes:
In summary, the official narrative
doesn’t add up. In fact, it’s all a “staged violence”
event which combines real violence with a fake narrative to
achieve a specific political purpose. In this case, the goal
is the complete disarmament of the American people, blaming
Trump for everything and positioning illegals as
“victims” of a mass shooting when, in reality, it was
Americans who were actually shot.
Straw man, Mikey: nobody is positioning
"illegals" as vics of the shooting. They're positioning
innocent people of all ages, most of whom were Hispanic, as the
victims of a shooter who could very well have been influenced by
hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric. Big difference.
There's one thing that Adams got correct, though... well, sort
of. I think he was right to be skeptical about both the
provenance of the four-page manifesto widely attributed to the El
Paso shooter, and its possible correlation to the actual
shooting.
Forensic manifestering
That four-page manifesto, posted on the hate forum
8chan around the time of the El Paso shooting (but still, to my
knowledge, not 100 percent proven to have actually been
written by the man who is in custody for the shooting) has
played a part in all of the journalistic coverage and online
nattering about the incident, and certainly it has played a role
in at least some of the conspiracy theories that are swirling
around both the El Paso and the Dayton shootings.
As was the case with a 74-page manifesto, also posted on 8chan
and widely attributed to the crazy who murdered 51 people in a couple of mosques
in Christchurch, New Zealand this past March (but still, to my knowledge, not 100 percent proven to
have actually been written by him), the four-page memo appears to
express some ideologically contradictory views. On the one hand
-- the right hand, let's call it -- both docs contain strong
expressions of racism, xenophobia, white/European supremacy, and
a desire to fight the "invasions" of non-white-European
immigrants. On the other hand (okay, the left one), the writers
seem to be upset about the destruction of the environment, as
well as some of the misdeeds of big corporations.
Since this past weekend I have been involved in several lengthy
discussions about this matter, mostly about the screed believed
to have been written by the shooter in El Paso. These discussions
have been fraught with political partisanship "from both
sides."
Trump critics point to the blatant racism and xenophobia (in the
El Paso case, the hatreds and fears around the so-called
"Hispanic invasion" of America and particularly Texas).
They point the finger of blame, at least in part, at Trump, for
his own divisive rhetoric and policies that encourage these fears
and hatreds.
Trump defenders triumphantly point to the gripes about the
environment and corporate America, claiming that that these are
proof that the document is largely a leftist/liberal/socialist
message, and that therefore the El Paso shooter was motivated by
leftism/liberalism/socialism. They claim that the "fake
news" media have deliberately glossed over those aspects of
the document in order to lay the blame at Trump's feet and
advance a false narrative of racism and white supremacy.
Some stalwart Trump defenders have even declared that the
manifesto -- especially in conjunction with the fact that (as
mentioned above) the late shooter in Dayton had expressed
Democratic, liberal, and even socialist political views -- offers
proof of the wingnut assertion that "liberalism is a disease
and socialism kills."
That's quite a stretch -- especially since the El Paso
shooter has not, to my knowledge, described himself as a liberal
or a leftist or a socialist. And if you'll pardon a momentary
digression from my spiel about manifestos, to which I promise to
return momentarily, the Ohio shooter, to whom no manifesto has
been credited but who left a social media trail, had a long and troubled history
that had nothing to do with politics. He was obsessed with
violence and mass murders. As well, he sometimes claimed to
"hear voices," he was troubled by "dark
thoughts," his behavior indicated misogynistic tendencies,
and he even infamously posted "hit lists" of high
school classmates that he wanted to kill or rape.
Although his social media postings painted him as left-leaning
(and, judging by one single tweet, an Elizabeth Warren supporter), police are at this time still trying to figure out a
motive for the shooting. I personally think it had something to
do with the shooter's long personal history of sick obsession
with violence, combined with a twisted obsession for his sister,
Megan, who was one of his victims -- but who, in a complicated
twist, was apparently a transgender male who had taken on the
name of Jordan Cofer, but who had not
yet come out to his family or to most of his friends. I don't
think that the sibling-dynamics aspect has been properly examined yet, but
I assume that if there's a "there" there, it will all
come out eventually. As of now, it is unclear whether or not the
Dayton shooter knew about his sibling's gender issues, and it
does not appear that he was motivated by transphobia.
It does appear that the "violent ideologies" angle that the FBI is
now exploring as a possible motive
aren't focused on antifa or leftist organizations or forums, but
rather on forums and groups of so-called incel (involuntarily celibate) men,
who personify the term "toxic masculinity" and
can indeed be violent. But again, the
true motive(s) for the Dayton shooting are still a mystery, to
both investigators and probably most of the people who knew the
late shooter.
Nevertheless Trump and various rightist ranters are now pointing
fingers of blame for the Dayton shooting at Elizabeth Warren and
the Democrats -- which at the very
least is absurd false equivalency, since unlike Trump, neither
Warren nor the Dems have been systematically and repeatedly
spreading vile rhetoric that emboldens racists and xenophobes and
violent actors in general. It isn't Warren or any Democratic
presidential candidate who are constantly holding fascist-style
rallies where impassioned throngs chant about a Muslim
congresswoman, "Send her back!" or, in response to a
question about how to handle illegal immigrants, yell, "Shoot
'em!" while Trump laughs. It isn't Warren or the Dems who
encourage their supporters to beat up on protesters. The Dems and
liberals are the ones speaking out against hatred and
violence -- and against unfettered access to guns, for that
matter.
In short, it isn't liberalism that's the disease
and socialism that kills. It's hate that is both disease and
killer, and these days it's far-right hatred more often than not.
And hateful rhetoric (including Trump's) isn't blameless. Furthermore Trump's occasional attempts to ameliorate
the effects of his hate-mongering not only sound insincere, but ignore the real problems.
Take those visits and photo-ops in Dayton and El Paso this past Wednesday, which seemed characteristically
tone-deaf -- particularly the incident where he posed, grinning
and thumbs-upping, as Melania cradled a two-month-old infant who
had been orphaned in the El Paso shooting, and whose family
brought the child back to the hospital for the meeting. In my
view, the indecency of that moment with the infant and his family
is only slightly mitigated by the fact that the child's uncle, Tito Anchondo, said that the child's
late father was a Trump supporter, and that Tito himself wanted
to have the meeting so he could talk to Trump and see if he was
"genuine" in his condolences.
Speaking to NPR, Tito said that his family has always been
Republican conservatives, and while he characterized some of
Trump's comments as being "in bad taste" and said he
could understand why people were linking Trump's anti-immigrant
rhetoric to the xenophobic manifesto attributed to the gunman, he
believes that overall the public is "misconstruing" the
president's ideas. Sounds like faint praise to me, but maybe I'm
just projecting. In any case, Tito apparently did not come to any
firm conclusion about whether or not Trump's condolences were in
fact "genuine."
* * * * *
But let's get back to the manifestos. I could
probably write several long posts refuting the argument that some
seemingly "leftist" sentiments in both the four-page
manifesto and the 74-page one prove that they are
liberal/socialist docs, and that therefore the shooters who
supposedly wrote them are leftists/liberals too. But that would
be a waste of time on two levels. First, these manifestos are
actually written to manipulate and to keep everyone guessing;
it's just a form of entertainment for the sickos who write them
(more on that below). Secondly, others have beat me to some
specific refutations, so I'll just provide a few links.
I'll begin with the environmental issue, which is the big smoking
gun, so to speak, that jumps out for right-wingers trying to pin
the manifestos, and the shootings, on leftist/liberal/socialist
influences. As this August 5 opinion piece on The Intercept site points out, environmental extremism actually exists on
the right as well as the left. A genuine concern for the
environment and for the human-fueled climate crisis should not be
a partisan matter, but it has become one, and in the US is more
commonly associated with "liberals," because
"liberals" are the ones who are pushing initiatives to
address the problems. And by and large environmental advocates
and activists are not extremists, though left-leaning
eco-extremists do of course exist. But right-wing eco-extremism
-- eco-fascism, if you will -- is actually a thing too. From the
Intercept article:
Against the perilous climate change
denialism typical of U.S. conservatives, environmental
decimation is broadly seen as a liberal and left concern. But
eco-fascism has seen a notable reemergence among far-right
groups and festering corners online in the U.S. and Europe.
While campaigning for the European elections, Marine Le Pen
of France’s far-right National Rally party promised to make
the “first ecological civilization” of a “Europe of
nations,” claiming that “nomadic” people with “no
homeland” do not care about the environment. Neo-Nazi
Richard Spencer wrote in a 2017 manifesto, “We have the
potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer.”
And corporation-bashing? Well, the writer of
the manifesto attributed to the El Paso shooting seemed to be
pissed off at American corporations not because they are
capitalistic (which would be a gripe that you'd expect from a
socialist), but because (1) they are replacing many human workers
with automation, cutting down on the number of good jobs
available (not an invalid complaint, actually); and (2) for many
years they have taken advantage of cheap labor from undocumented
immigrants (mostly Hispanic immigrants in Texas and several other
states), and therefore are as culpable for the so-called
"Hispanic invasion" as anyone else.
But one toxic and very clearly right-wing/white nationalist
thread runs strongly through both the four-page and the 74-page
manifestos, as well as similar messages on the hate forums: the "great replacement theory." This is the white nationalist article of faith -- so
central that the writer of that 74-page document titled his work,
"The Great Replacement" -- that insists leftist
"elites" are plotting to repopulate majority white
countries with foreigners, usually Muslims or Hispanics, in order
to gain a political advantage.
This poisonous brew of hatred and fear has seeped from the fever swamps into the right-wing
mainstream. In fact the Trump campaign is not above exploiting the theme for
its own means, using the volatile word
"invasion" as the focal point, as Trump himself has on
numerous occasions in his speeches and tweets. The point is that
the invasion/replacement tropes are a major theme, if not the
main theme, of the hateful manifestos -- and that is
not a leftist, liberal, or socialist construct.
But there is an even more important point that too many of us (me
included) seem to have overlooked in all of our own passionate
exchanges: manifestos lie. They're written by people who
are just yanking our chains. I don't mean to suggest that the
writers are actually open-minded, tolerant, love-filled liberals
who are champions of diversity and equality. Quite the opposite
seems to be true. But they are having fun at our
expense, keeping the press, politicians, the public, and
investigators guessing.
Whether you see the two screeds attributed to the New Zealand and
the El Paso shooters as rabid rightism or lethal leftism, the
important thing to know is that these documents and those like
them are above all manipulative, and even if poorly written they
are crafted to give maximum exposure to the loathsome ideas
therein. For all practical purposes there is a formula for these
missives.
They are often rambling and, as I noted above, appear to be
espousing ideologically contradictory ideas, which prompts both
amateur and professional forensic "investigators" to
cherry-pick and assign blame to "the other side" -- but
very often, that's exactly the point. The writers want attention.
And discussions/arguments equal attention. Even if their ideas
are presented in the harshest and most critical light... that's
still attention.
Complete silence is not the answer; people deserve to know what
may be going on in the background. But widely publishing the
screeds in their entirety isn't the answer either. So journalists
have to walk a fine line between informing the public and giving
the writers (and possible actors) too much of that coveted
attention. And I imagine that law enforcement officials and
investigators have to be careful not to read too much -- or too
little -- into the writings, especially if there is still some
doubt about whether or not the writer of a given document was
actually the person who committed a given violent crime.
Both the public and law enforcement have a need for clear
answers; investigators want to close cases, of course, so that
justice may be done, and people in general want an answer that
somehow makes sense, even if it makes sense in a totally crazy
way. That's why journalists as well as investigators -- not to
mention the rest of us bewildered souls who are watching all of
this unfold -- grasp for answers and often jump to conclusions.
We need to be aware that the manifestos written by crazies are
only a piece of the puzzle, and sometimes a deceptive one at
that. Here's a cautionary note from Wired, published August 4.
There’s inherent
danger in covering [the manifestos] at all, and even more so
at face value.
“It’s not a good-faith document. It isn’t information
that is sincerely offered. It is manipulation that is
deliberately forwarded in the hopes that journalists will
report it verbatim, will dissect it for days and weeks and
months and years,” says [Syracuse University researcher
Whitney] Phillips. “There’s an awareness of the audience,
and that should make us very, very suspicious of anything
that’s in those documents.”
It’s not that the alleged shooters are insincere in their
hatred. But the contours of that hate are irrelevant,
Phillips argues, and often for show.
Those cautions apply not only to the media, of course, but
also to anyone who encounters these postings...
And here's a Vox piece, published
just after the New Zealand shooting, that offers further insight
into these manipulative manifestos. From that piece:
...it’s also worth
mentioning that a lot of the document is akin to what’s
known as “shitposting” — intentionally throwing out
red-meat content to readers to distract them or draw them
deeper into the same online pits where [the writer] himself was radicalized.
For example, the Christchurch shooter mentions a popular
YouTube personality and a popular American right-wing figure
before joking that he was radicalized in reality by the game
Fortnite, which taught him to “floss on the corpses of my
enemies” (flossing being a dance move that the game helped
popularize.) He also describes himself as an expert in
“gorilla warfare.” Many people reading the manifesto
jumped on those mentions immediately, which is, as Robert
Evans, a journalist and expert on far-right terror
communication argued, exactly the point.
While “shitposting” is a common thread in far-right online culture — meme-ing racism and anti-Semitism is how
white supremacists hope to spread their ideology — jokey
characteristics of the manifesto are in line with similar
language used in older far-right groups as well.
In short, everything in the Christchurch shooter’s
manifesto is what the Christchurch shooter wants us to know
about him. Like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who killed three
people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign
from the 1970s to the 1990s, or even Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf, published in 1925, the point of these manifestos is
not to be factual or realistic about the inner worlds of
their authors. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as a
talented artist and lover of architecture. In Kaczynski’s
manifesto, he portrays himself as a man profoundly concerned
about the material problems of industrial society. Manifestos
aren’t honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful for people who
study terrorist movements, particularly white nationalism.
Rather, connections between manifestos and the terrorists who
write them — what they say, how they say it, and who they
mention — tell us about the international flow of white
nationalist ideology.
Crusius’s motive seems
clear and aligns neatly with its execution. But warnings have
materialized since that suggest looking for meaning in the
manifesto is folly. The online forum 8chan
— which hosted both the Christchurch killer’s and
Crusius’s alleged missives — has been written about
extensively as an insular network fueled by in-jokes and
obscure references aimed at an audience of fellow 8chan
users. As such, the argument goes, attempts by journalists to
extract a coherent political ideology from such documents are
playing the killers’ game: incorrectly ascribing motives
for their behavior to high-profile social or political
entities, thus generating arguments and finger-pointing, and
maximizing exposure for the perpetrators. “The first
mistake people are making is to assume the creep meant
anything he said in his manifesto,” tweeted Epoch
Times columnist Brian Cates, in a series of posts to this
effect amplified by conservative activist Candace Owens.
“Part of the ‘fun’” for the Christchurch killer and
his copycats, a group that Cates suggests
includes Crusius, was “that they knew the authorities were
going to treat his contradictory, absurd manifesto as if it
were ‘real.’” Our new reality, Cates added, is
“[mass] shootings done for ‘fun’ as the ultimate troll
where these shitposters write confusing manifestos and then
sit back [and] watch the fun as both sides claim he belongs
to the other.”
That's something we all need to
remember, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum. And
I'm lecturing to myself as much as I am to anyone else.
Even so, it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the Trump effect and the
larger issues of white-right terrorism and the re-emergence of fascism.
And it's an even bigger mistake to give serious
consideration to the cynically conspiranoid histrionics of Alex
Jones or Mike Adams, or the equally cynical and blatantly political declarations of Dan Patrick, when trying to puzzle out why
madmen go on rampages with high-powered weapons that they never should have been allowed
to get their hands on in the first place.
* * * * *
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