Once Again: El Paso police report Multiple shooters at Mall

At first it was reported that there were four shooters.

The number of casualties varied, from 18 to ten, then one confirmed dead then more.

A manifesto purportedly written by Crusius, perhaps even in the hours before the shooting attack that according to one report left at least 15 people dead, was left behind. Pages of the manifesto included anti-immigrant rhetoric with the author going into depth on why he is “against race mixing,” supports the idea to “send them back” and offering a prediction of “genocide.”

The President tweeted about the shooting at 4:10 p.m. Eastern time, following his well-wishes to those affected with a tweet cheering on the MMA fighter Colby Covington, 14 minutes later.

The Interplay of Manifestos and Right Wing Media Dialogue

Authorities are still sorting out the background of the gunman in this horrific far right terror attack in El Paso, Texas. But he appears to have left a “manifesto” and a lengthy social media trail. Assuming these identifications are correct, they portray a sadly familiar “great replacement” theory white supremacist radical.

What is particularly notable in this case is the intermingling and co-evolution of these manifestos with more mainstream righting media dialog.

There’s abundant evidence the shooter is a big fan of President Trump and certainly of his worldview. And yet the manifesto includes a sort of preemptive rebuttal of any claims that he is a Trump supporter or that Trump influenced. He predicts that “the media” will identify him as a white supremacist and blame President Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric for radicalizing him and provoking the attack. Such claims would be “fake news” and such claims will indeed only prove that “the media” is “fake news.

After these horrors, we expect rightwing talking heads to attack any suggestion that these attacks might be related to the President’s politics and rhetoric. But here the assailant is doing so himself in advance. Indeed he denies Trump’s influence by using Trump’s signature attack lines. For someone who specifically denies Trump radicalized him, he’s very focused protecting the President. He doth protest rather too much.

The gaslighting is actually baked into the attack itself. He wants to be both the assailant and part of the post massacre spin and pro-Trump defense.

This thread is now out of date, another deadly shooting in Dayton Ohio.

Virtue signalling is the conspicuous expression of moral values. Academically, the phrase relates to signalling theory and describes a subset of social behaviors that could be used to signal virtue—especially piety among the religious.

But as used by oralloy and others who are drenched in the modern right wing world