The Examiner is a joke and she’s likely a hack and may be going for the Antifa angle, but the truth is there is obviously a reason he went to El Paso from the Dallas area, and it’s a pretty obvious reason.
Allen, TX: 10.9% Hispanic/Latino
El Paso, TX: 82.8% Hispanic/Latino
He’s a white nationalist, according to his manifesto he views immigration as the Hispanic invasion of Texas, he thinks Democrats are going to take over Texas and Hispanics are going to vote themselves free stuff in Texas, and he thinks there’s a Second Amendment solution so he drove to a place on the border to carry it out. He drove to the biggest border town in Texas, which is over 80% Hispanic.
This was obviously domestic terror carried out by a white nationalist. If the FBI is fair and competent, they should have that part of the investigation wrapped up in about 30 minutes.
Trump only carried 25% of El Paso County. The big cities in Texas, with the exception of Dallas, are mostly Democratic. The areas along the border as well, to the best of my knowledge. Everything in between is bright red.
That said, don’t mistake “mostly Democratic” for “staunchly liberal.” Like Austin is very liberal, Houston is more moderate, so it goes deeper than just the % of Democratic votes.
I could be wrong, but my gut says that the proper way to address this shooting politically is to focus on white nationalism and not guns. I’ve been fearfully expecting something like this to happen for a while now, and quite frankly it could have been a lot worse. If we don’t do anything about it soon (and soon means more like days/weeks than weeks/months), they will get worse. I don’t want to lay out specifics for some racist scumbag scouring the Internet for ideas to use, but just imagine if four or five people coordinated something like this. The carnage would not go up by a factor of four or five, it would go up by a factor of 10+.
The conditions have been right for this to happen for months, Trump and Trumpism has planted the seeds and it’s been festering. We’ve had smaller incidents, or less clear incidents. We don’t know the names or races of the victims yet, but I expect them to be over 90% Hispanic if not higher. There’s a disgusting, racist, white nationalist manifesto. It uses words Trump uses all the time.
In fact, I suspect that’s why Trump condemned this a little more outright than he usually does. I suspect his advisers told him he better not fuck around with this one and do any “fine people on both sides,” bullshit. Although give it a day or two, as usual.
Anyway, this is just such a clear cut case of far-right, white nationalist,domestic terror. Democrats must call it out as such. They must link Trump’s rhetoric to it. They must force a national conversation on that. It’s something we MIGHT be able to actually get some federal action on, it’s going to have much more broad support than gun control, and it’s a political winner for them going into 2020. It feels gross to bring that up, but if we want to prevent these in the future a huge part of that is getting Trump out of the Oval Office.
If the left starts up on gun control in the next few days, that’ll be where the conversation goes and the white nationalism won’t get enough attention. There is a 0.0% chance of doing literally anything on gun control between now and 2021. There’s a non-zero chance of donig something about white nationalism.
Holy shit. Checked in with Fox again and, I shit you not, the very first thing I see was a guest mention an increase in white nationalism and the anchor goes apeshit, “HOLD ON I’M GONNA STOP YOU RIGHT THERE, WE’RE NOT GOING TO SPECULATE!” Jesus fucking christ Fox. This anchor was some young guy I’d never seen and my god did he toe the line. Then the guest tried to mention white nationalism again and the anchor cut him off, insisting they were up against a “hard break” and the “computer was going to cut them off” so he cut the guest off and then pathetically tried to fill time while rambling over some hospital footage. Some hard break. It’s basically a coverup fest on Fox, full-on Trump propaganda.
EDIT: I hope this clip shows up on Twitter or something, it’s ridiculous
Early indications are 10+ people shot. Someone claiming to be a bystander on Twitter says the shooter was a white male, and posted a video of bodies in body bags on the street.
Yeah I don’t know which specific areas/counties/districts break down which way, but overall I am pretty sure the Dallas metropolitan area overall is way more conservative and white than the other big cities in Texas.
There’s a video on Twitter, you can see people running but nothing graphic. It appears to be a block or two from the scene, and you can hear the gunfire. I counted 65+ shots in 32 seconds. Most sound relatively far away, but in the middle I’m pretty sure you hear a bullet whiz past the car.
(This is referring to Dayton. Guess I better fucking specify.)
I was curious after you introduced this, and did a bit of research. I was pretty surprised with the results.
As of 2010, whites made up 50.7 percent of the population in Dallas. It’s a diverse city. As of the 2010 Census, there were 6.372 million in the DFW metroplex with only 50.2 percent whites. In 2018, the estimate is 7.540 million people with no demographic breakdown.
Fort Worth still had a 61 percent white population in 2010, though that is a much lower level than in something like 1970 (where it was nearly 80 percent, but not much lower than it was in 1990 at 63.8 percent), and it’s maybe even significantly lower now.
Neither of those cities are as diverse as Houston (was diverse in the 1970s), which is considered the most diverse city in the United States.
Austin, by major contrast (a very liberal city or at least a city with a lot of liberals) is 68.3 percent white as of 2010. San Antonio is 72.6 percent white as of 2010. El Paso is listed as 92 percent white in 2017.
Further examples are that Beto crushed in Dallas County (66.1%), and won Tarrant County which is where Fort Worth is with 49.9 percent of the vote, a major feat there. The only major city that he did better than Dallas in was Travis County which includes Austin at 74.3 percent. He won most of the Mexican border counties (lost 3 badly) and all of the biggest cities, but got crushed nearly everywhere else (almost every border county of NM, OK, and LA had Cruz with 80+).
FYI: I grew up in Fort Worth and still have extensive ties to the area, if that’s not known.
