The news from El Paso, Texas:
A young gunman opened fire in an El Paso, Texas, shopping area packed with as many as 3,000 people during the busy back-to-school season Saturday, leaving 20 dead and more than two dozen injured.
Authorities were investigating the possibility the shooting was a hate crime, working to confirm whether a racist, anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly beforehand was written by the man arrested in the attack on the 680,000-resident border city.
And here's the evidence that the shooter wrote and posted the screed - from
bellingcat:
On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire. As of the publication of this article, at least eighteen people have died and several others have been injured. One victim was a four-month old infant. As we’ve seen with two other mass shootings this year, the killer announced the start of his rampage on 8chan’s /pol board. The poster also attached a four-page manifesto to the post, along with a document in his original post that included his name — Patrick Crusius.
Looking to an archived copy of the 8chan post, we can see that the post was made at the Unix time of 1564848920, which converts to August 3, 2019 at 4:15pm (UTC) — or, in local El Paso time (UTC-6), 10:15am, just before the first reports surfaced of a shooting in El Paso.
While all of this could technically be an extremely elaborate hoax, it would require the poster to know the suspect’s name well ahead of time. Additionally, there is the fact that the post was made before any public reports of a shooting, and even longer before the name of the suspected shooter was released to the public, and included information that matched the attack (model of weapon, targeting a heavily-Hispanic area).
Pretty safe to say in the meantime that the El Paso shooter is the manifesto writer.
So what of this manifesto screed?
Well, it starts with this:
In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.
The "Christchurch Shooter" would be Harrison Terrant and his manifesto is 74 pages long and is titled "The Great Replacement."
The title of Terrant's manifesto is, in turn, a reference to a white right-wing racist conspiracy theory also known as "replacement theory" which posits a plot to replace white people with non-white people. Some pushing the theory blame George Soros specifically, others are a bit more general:
While Renard Camus, the french philosopher who first wrote of "
Le Grand Remplacement" in 2011, did not include an anti-Semitic element, he does call the conspiracy theory "
the nephew of Nazism."
Anyway, back to El Paso and the shooter. His next three sentences are:
This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
Note that last word. It's also in this tweet:
And this tweet:
El Paso is right on the US-Mexican border.
Just another day in Trump's America.
And now there's another shooting - this time in Dayton.
MAGA!
