New details are being released about Mauricio Garcia, the man who shot and
killed eight people and
injured seven others during his shooting spree at a mall in suburb near Dallas.
There had been allegations early on that he had engaged
in some way with neo Nazi and incel content.
Well, it looks like there actually had been a lot of that.
So here's the details.
So he had posted to the Russian site Odnolassniki which I'm not familiar with,
handwritten material indicating that he read The Daily Stormer,
a neo-Nazi website.
I like just sarcastically alluded to the possibility yesterday that he would have
gone to The Daily Stormer.
I considered that an outdated old school Nazi thing.
No, he was still doing it.
He also made repeated references encouraging violence against women,
of course celebrating rape and murder, and using the vocabulary of the male
supremacist incel, or involuntarily celibate community.
None of this seems particularly surprising.
I mean, maybe the going to The Daily Stormer,
but the idea that a young man who ends up trying to kill as many people as possible
also violently despised women is par for the course at this point.
We just, I think, sort of expect that.
In any event, he posted hundreds of posts,
including with explicitly racist rhetoric of course.
He apparently had the logo of the SS, a paramilitary organization, with the Nazis.
He got that at some point in the last year, I suppose.
He apparently visited the mall beforehand to try to figure out when he would be able
to do the most damage.
And in addition to sort of generalized incel and Nazi content,
he had made specific references to several figures on the right,
including Tim Poole of Tim Cast,
Chiarishik of the Libs of TikTok, and Nick Fuentes as well.
Now, of course, none of those individuals knew who this person was.
They didn't tell them to do this, they're not individually responsible,
which is why they're not facing a lawsuit right now.
But it is now on them to realize that these are the sorts of people who
are paying attention to them.
And look, obviously anyone could have a fan of theirs that gets violent.
The Cast of The Marvelous Miss Maisel could have someone watch them and
then go commit a terror attack.
It would then be on someone to create a linkage if you want to assert some sort
of responsibility.
I leave that to every individual to use their own critical thinking capacity to
say, is there potentially a link between an act of violence perpetrated by someone
with a very clear ideological bent and the sort of content that they consume that has
increasingly over the last few years, openly advocated for violence.
So I don't know, just putting that out there.
Aida what do you think about all this?
>> Especially in a country where we don't value nor prioritize mental health, we
definitely have to take into consideration that the A word accountability, right?
So people don't have personal accountability anymore because they're so
greedy.
The capitalism in this country is toxic.
And we've gotten to a point where everything is about making a dollar, and
those dollars far more supersede the value of human life in this country.
And that is why we have so many of those problems, because we don't wanna spend
the dollars in mental health and helping the people who are veterans.
All these patriots who love the veterans don't give a damn about them when they
come back.
We have people who are really struggling with a lot of mental issues.
One thing I wanted to quickly address with this story is because I
did have a lot of people reach out to me asking me,
how is it that a Latino could be a white supremacist and he is a white man?
When we talk about assimilation, which I talk about often, and
I get a lot of pushback people who really want to assimilate into white culture and
then they start assuming what they think is white behavior.
And white supremacy tends to be one of those behaviors that come along with
people who wanna assimilate into a culture so
that they don't have to be part of the lower group anymore.
This whole thing that we have been seeing around this shooter and
many of the other shooters has a lot to do with mental health.
It has a lot to do with men in this time not having an opportunity to cope with
their feelings and emotions because socially they've been shunned for
doing that.
There's a lot of stuff here that we need to unpack, and in order for
us to forge forward, we have to face these things honestly, and we're not doing that.
>> Yeah, look, I think you rightly pointed out a few different things that we should
be working on.
The issue is that those that you identified,
while the right will occasionally reference those things in the wake of
a mass shooting as a distraction from guns,
they don't then actually wanna do anything about it.
Like they talk about mental health, but Reagan shut down the mental hospitals.
And where's the new funding coming from?
I don't see right wings pushing for it, giving men a forum to come to grips with
their difficulties, their struggles, their thoughts and their feelings.
If that existed, the right would be attacking it on a daily basis.
So there are some issues here.
And by the way, in terms of him being a supporter of white supremacy,
I think you very well pointed out that that is not impossible to imagine.
It is able to be understood why someone who might be Latino could also be a white
supremacist.
That said, I also think even if you're incapable of understanding that and
plenty of these racists don't have any knowledge of or
interest in understanding the racial dynamics of Latin or South America or
the history of colonization, or they don't care about any of that stuff.
But I would say to them, whether it makes sense to you,
it made sense to him because he was a white supremacist.
Even if it seems crazy, that's what he was.
Anyway, we're gonna find out more details.
Of course we wanna understand this sort of thing, but also sometimes it feels like
finding more details about the particular crazy person who did this is a stand in
for finding details about what's going to be done to stop the next from happening.
And we sort of know deep in our gut that nothing is gonna be done.
So I sort of worry about that.