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New details have emerged about the Texas mall gunman who fatally shot eight people, including three children, on Saturday.
NBC News reported the shooter maintained a profile on a Russian social networking platform and ranted against Jewish people, women and racial minorities.
He also posted photos of a flak vest emblazoned with patches, one of them with the initials for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a popular meme among far-right extremist groups. Another post included a series of shirtless pictures with visible white power tattoos, including a swastika.
And yet, not even swastika ink can convince some conservatives that the shooter held far-right views.
Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted racist bile such as: “Only dumb white people would believe that a Mexican gang member is killing people for white supremacy."
The shooter has no criminal history but facts apparently don’t matter for conservatives when labeling brown people carte blanche as “gang bangers” or “undocumented” or “drug dealers,” of course.
We know about the shooter’s hodgepodge of hate. But a big question remains: Did he choose this target deliberately? The way other shooters, even very recently, targeted certain groups in their death sprees?
We don’t know if there is a racialized motive here, and we may never know. But what we do know is that Allen, Texas, where the shooting took place, is among the Dallas-Fort Worth area’s most diverse suburbs. Per the census, it has a fast-growing Asian American population as well.
The shooter didn’t pick Dallas, where he is from. He chose Allen, about 25 miles north of downtown Dallas.
Let’s look at the victims again.
Let’s think about the 6-year-old survivor who lost his parents and little brother — and whose life will never be the same.
Let’s think about who lives in this city, who shops at this mall, and that at least half of those killed were Asian American.
Let’s think too about how the gunman deliberately targeted this mall, posting more than two dozen photos of it, as well as surrounding areas, including screenshots of Google location information, seemingly monitoring the mall at its busiest times.
These massacres are often random — but then ... they also aren’t.
And rather than considering, as a nation, what a person with hateful views and unfettered access to weapons is capable of, we’re pretending a person with a literal swastika tattoo can’t be a white supremacist.
This is an excerpt from Tuesday’s episode of “The ReidOut.” It has been slightly edited for length and clarity.