Even if the El Paso shooter's manifesto was meant to mislead its readers about his true motive, the 22 dead still tell us most of what we need to know, writes zakcheneyrice
Mourners in El Paso, Texas, after a mass shooting there killed 22 people in August. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images Is it possible to deduce meaning from nihilistic behavior? That’s one of the questions fueling the postmortem of Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. A manifesto purporting to outline the motives of the killer, Patrick Crusius, details a wealth of racist and xenophobic views aimed at Hispanics.
Crusius’s motive seems clear and aligns neatly with its execution. But warnings have materialized since that suggest looking for meaning in his manifesto is folly. The online forum 8chan — which hosted both the Christchurch killer’s and Crusius’s alleged missives — has been written on extensively as an insular network fueled by in-jokes and obscure references aimed primarily at an audience of fellow 8chan users.
There are some merits to this argument, though its sources should be viewed with skepticism — the Epoch Times was founded by adherents of a conspiratorial Chinese religious sect, Falun Gong, and has been criticized for its favorable coverage of far-right leaders in Europe and the U.S.; Owens, for her part, was cited by name in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto and so has reason to cast such documents as less meaningful than they might be.
It’s an interesting conclusion, insofar as it further illuminates the expanding uses of the internet. But the dynamic it describes is not especially new. Whether Crusius actually believed in the great replacement and felt it justified the mass murder of Hispanics is immaterial to the reality that he murdered 32 people in a matter of minutes — the vast majority of them Hispanic, including at least seven Mexican nationals — and attributed his actions to the great replacement.
In a case like Crusius’s, though, they’re fairly clear: to kill Hispanic people and to be known for doing so. The depth of his belief in the white-supremacist conspiracy theory cited in the manifesto is hardly a worthwhile topic for investigation. Few puzzle over the sincerity of any individual lynch-mob participant’s hatred for black people in 1877.
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