Elon Musk, a living, breathing “bad psyop,” wants you to believe that authorities have it wrong that the Latino man who killed eight people in a Texas outlet mall was motivated by White nationalism.
Actually, in an interview on CNBC on Tuesday, Musk, the Chief Pandering Twit, said ascribing the shooting perpetrated by Mauricio Garcia, who was shot and killed by police after opening fire at the Allen, Texas, shopping center to White nationalism was “bullshit.”
Where Musk’s doubling and tripling and et cetera down on this resonates with those on the right who want to distract attention from the motivations discovered by police investigators is that Garcia is, yes, Latino.
Leading to the obvious question: how can somebody who isn’t White be a White nationalist?
The answer begins with, well, Garcia would not exactly be the first Latino to be linked to the White nationalist movement.
Consider, for instance, Enrique Tarrio, the Afro-Cuban former leader of the Proud Boys, who was on hand at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of local Confederate monuments, and in 2020, led a group that vandalized three historic Black churches in Washington, D.C., and set fire to a “Black Lives Matter” banner that they took from one of the churches.
Nick Fuentes would be another Latino who is a well-known White nationalist. Fuentes, who is of Mexican descent, checks a number of the hatemonger boxes – neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denier, Charlottesville 2017 and Jan. 6 attendee.
And then, yes, there’s the late Mauricio Garcia, who posted photos of himself on social media to show off his Nazi tattoos, regularly shared screeds indicating his hate for Asians and Muslims, and fantasies of a pending race war.
“Bigotry and anti-authoritarianism exist in a lot of different places, in a lot of different ways. It’s not surprising that people of color can also be attracted to it,” said Lindsay Schubiner, the director of the Western States Center‘s Momentum program to counter the ascension of White nationalism across the country.
White nationalist groups have been actively and strategically reaching out to people in the Latino, Asian and Black communities to try to broaden their base, and before you say, Black White nationalists, seriously?
Remember Kanye West and his “White Lives Matter” T-shirt?
Yeah.
“Part of it is just a decision to try to appeal to a greater audience,” Schubiner said. “We’re looking at these bigoted anti-democracy groups, and they’re mobilizing bigotry to build political power. And part of it is, some of these groups have also seen that bringing onboard more people of color can help defend them against charges of racism.”
Which, conveniently, is where shills like Elon Musk enter the story.
He wants you to believe that the notion that a Latino man can identify as a White nationalist is “bullshit,” to the point that his Twitter algorithms are amplifying that message, in service of his desire to suppress the inconvenient truth, that there’s hate everywhere, and that’s where the money is for the Twitters of the world.
If only the people in charge of our social-media outlets would tweak their algorithms to promote peace, love and understanding, right?
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Chris Graham
