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May 9, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
40:03
The Making of a Murderer
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to my journal.
I hope you are doing well.
Well, we had a rather depressing weekend.
And I don't think it was necessarily personally depressing, but it was certainly depressing in terms of the news and how we think of ourselves as a country.
Speaking from an American standpoint, I guess you could also say that it was depressing in terms of how other people think of America.
We witnessed two rather shocking events.
First, there was a mass shooting that left nine dead.
I think there are additional others who are in critical condition.
At a shopping mall in Allen, Texas, which is north of Dallas.
This was followed swiftly the next morning by a car accident that might very well have been a car attack.
The person who did this is named Jorge Alvarez.
So there were two Hispanic males, both Involved in things that are terrifying.
School shootings and spree shootings are nothing new.
And as depressing as it might be, you could just chalk it all up to mental illness and social contagion and alienation and the Availability of dangerous guns in the country, etc.
But with both of these attacks, there seemed to be something more.
So, immediately after the attack occurred in Allen, Texas, I noticed on my Twitter feed that I shouldn't call it Gloating, exactly.
Maybe schadenfreude is getting closer to what I mean.
But there was a certain euphoria about the attack of, look at this, an illegal immigrant did it.
So Mauricio Garcia was killed by the police, justifiably.
There was video being passed around of his corpse, and it was clear that he is Hispanic.
He is a darker-skinned mestizo type.
You know what I mean.
And so there was a certain euphoria or schadenfreude of...
Among the right of, you know, this is what happens when we allow these immigrants in.
They're crazy.
They hate America.
They're criminals.
They're gang members.
And some of them, I assume, are good people.
You know the routine.
And similar emotions were expressed regarding the car incident.
Then we started to learn more.
At first, we learned about a strange tattoo that Garcia had on one of his hands, which strangely reminded me of the logo for the Dallas Public School District.
As you might know, I grew up in Dallas.
I lived there ever since I was around two years old until I was 19. And I've been back many times, of course, so I know that city well.
I'm not sure if I've ever been to Allen, but I've heard of it.
Anyway, so there was a lot of criminology-type analysis of the tattoo, what it means.
Is it a car dealership?
Is it a gang?
Is it so on and so forth?
There are many very well-organized, violent...
Drug gangs that are involved with the cartels that, of course, involve many young Hispanics.
But then we learned something that was ostensibly, at least, extremely bizarre.
Surprising.
That Garcia had a patch on his vest that said basically right-wing death squads.
R-W-D-S.
What does this mean?
The first time I ever heard that phrase was not 2016, when that phrase was passed around Twitter on the alt-right.
Obviously, it was an extremely outlandish.
Outrageous rhetoric that predominated, but I actually heard it out of the mouth of Ann Coulter.
She was actually speaking at CPAC in 2014.
CPAC's, of course, the conservative gathering held every year, held multiple times a year, I think.
And she said conservatives should make it clear to Republicans that if they pass amnesty, They're going on to the death squad with the people who wrecked America.
That, of course, got huge applause from the crowd.
I can remember, I think I was actually in Washington at the time, and I was with a number of other right-wing types, and everyone was like, oh, you know, based, that kind of thing.
So what she was saying, effectively, and obviously she was using tough talk and outrageous language, but what she was basically saying is that the Republicans pass amnesty.
We're going to put them in a death squad.
I think she meant that we were going to put them to death.
So again, that meme, I heard it first from Ann Coulter, but the meme was passed around quite a bit on Twitter after that.
And during the Trump presidency.
I think in that sense, it was more of a death squad of a group of right-wingers who were going to go kill, you know, who knows, the evil liberals who did this or illegal immigrants or whatever.
And it is also kind of referenced to Pinochet and his...
Attacks on his leftist enemies.
So what was that patch doing on the vest of Garcia?
It's all rather curious.
I think you could plausibly say that, well, you know, it's just some coincidence.
He found some patch and put it on there.
You know, bikers will put on all sorts of crazy patches and so on.
Doesn't mean anything, but...
I don't think that's the case.
And the more we learn about Garcia, the more I think this was not just a kind of narcissistic mass shooting like we saw in Columbine, being the paradigm of...
You know, we're alienated from this school and we're gonna go out in a blaze of glory and get revenge against the jocks and the cheerleaders who oppressed us.
Something like that.
Where it was political in some way.
It was kind of sub-political.
There's a tinge of politics to it.
But it was mostly theatrical and narcissistic.
What seems to be suggested...
By what we learn about Mauricio Garcia is that he was engaged in a kind of terrorism.
That is, he was engaged in a political act for a political end.
Even if it were nihilistic and led to his own death, it was still trying to accomplish something or at the very least send a message.
so once more research was done we learned that that doesn't And of course, on Sunday, on Twitter, you know, I mentioned that I saw that kind of schadenfreude, if that's the right term, regarding an immigrant killer.
They then went to a different mode, which is, you know, why is the mainstream media claiming that this guy's a white supremacist?
Look at him.
He's Hispanic.
How could he possibly be a white supremacist?
And, you know, I think a lot of that almost this...
The conservatives are kind of obsessed with the idea of a narrative that's being...
Put forward by the liberals, and for good reason in many ways.
I think, you know, all media is kind of storytelling, narrative-making.
But they take it so far to the extent that it's almost like there's no reality here, that this was some gang shooting over drugs, but because those mean old liberals hate conservatives so much, they're going to turn Garcia into a conservative or something.
Well, the more and more we learn about Garcia, the more clear it becomes that he actually was motivated by this kind of ideology.
So, I'm just going to read a little bit.
This is from a report in the New York Times from today.
After Texas mall shooting, searching for motive and grieving for children.
Investigators trying to learn why a gunman fatally shot at least eight people at a Texas mall or examining a social media profile rife with hate-filled rants against women and black people that they believe belonged to the gunman.
The profile found on the social media site OKRU Matches the gunman's birthday and refers to a motel where he was staying before the shooting.
The profile also includes language praising Hitler with references to neo-Nazi websites like the Daily Stormer.
On Sunday afternoon, officials identified the gunman who was killed at the time, Marcio Garcia.
The motive for the attack remains unclear.
The police say he opened fire.
Okay, that's enough.
Once we dig even deeper, all of...
These hints and rumors seem to become corroborated.
This is from a Twitter account run by Alexander Reed Ross.
He delved deep into the OKRU account.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about that site later.
He says he was...
Says, this is according to the shooter himself, says he was radicalized through reading American Renaissance and V-Dare, then meeting a white nationalist in the army.
He was in the army and he was actually discharged at some point for a mental illness.
He laughs at the fact that non-whites can be racist too, adding gotcha.
Says he walked around with an it's okay to be white t-shirt.
I could go on and on.
It actually gets worse or more interesting, depending on your perspective.
He actually wrote a post claiming that he was inspired by libs of TikTok.
That's, of course, this extremely popular Twitter account that basically posts videos, as the name implies, from TikTok.
They're crazy leftists talking about gender.
And all that kind of nonsense.
They also found a picture of apparently the shooter.
Now, his head is out of the photo, so we can't be sure.
But it is a man that seemingly looks like them.
It's an Hispanic male.
And he has a Texas tattoo on his shoulder.
And then he also has a kind of lightning bolt SS-like tattoo and a swastika on his left pectoral.
It's actually quite reminiscent of a tattoo that is on the body of Weave, Andrew Algemeier, who has the same tattoo.
It's a tattoo that was made famous or infamous from the movie with Edward Norton, American History X, where he had that on his chest.
Again, according to his OKRU account, he was reading The Daily Stormer, so who knows what we can make of this.
Now, there's some interesting questions that we can go into.
First off, one might be, what...
What motivated him to do this, or what really motivated him to enter into right-wing, extreme-right ideology?
Now, I think a lot of leftists and liberals assume that it is the books and websites and Twitter accounts and just easy-answer-giving, hate-mongering ideology that...
So, if we could, perhaps, censor the web, or curate content, or at least debunk content that's coming from Amran or Vidair, or the Daily Stormer, much worse, or crazy anonymous accounts, etc.
Russian troll farms.
We could just kind of censor this or at the very least debunk it.
We could prevent people from falling prey to this.
So it's a kind of prey and predator dynamic in that mind.
Now, you could flip that around and say that people who are already mentally ill are attracted to extreme right positions.
Actually, in his book, which I worked on and published, called Spiteful Mutants, Ed Dutton writes about this, and he actually does reach that second conclusion, that in previous times, when we lived in much more conservative or authoritarian or even feudal societies,
the way to upset the apple cart would be to be a radical egalitarian or social leveler, etc.
And to a very large degree, that's still the case.
You know, you think of the stereotype of the alienated god We live in a liberal society now.
We have a political theology of...
Effectively liberationist democracy and personal autonomy and all the rest of it.
All of the kind of dominant ideology that will ultimately give birth to things like transgenderism, etc.
And in this type of environment, if you are a psychopath, Then you are going to be more attracted to the far right.
That if you really want to lash out at the world, then this is the way to do it.
I mean, those kids who went on Twitter and 4chan in 2016 and spread all these memes, I mean, what were they doing if not a kind of metaphorical school shooting?
and that's not to say that all of them are dumb or crazy in a kind of obvious sense but you know you You're lashing out online.
You are engaging in rhetoric that is so overheated.
It's, you know, gas chamber memes and death squad calls and all that kind of stuff.
That what you're doing is kind of consciously and actively attacking.
Your neighbors and countrymen or at the very least other people on these forums.
And so someone who has psychopathic traits is going to be attracted to that.
Now there actually is a study that involves around 500 people.
It was actually cited by Ed Dutton in the book.
It's by Jordan Moss and Peter O 'Connor.
You know, I don't think any study like this should be considered definitive.
Most studies are wrong, as it turns out, and, you know, this is one study, but it does suggest, this is the title of the study, The Dark Triad Traits Predict Authoritarian Political Correctness in Alt-Right Attitudes.
What he's saying is that people who are part of the dark triad traits, so that is psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
So people who are self-absorbed or feel extremely entitled or grandiose, or people who are truly psychopathic, have no sense of empathy or no conscience, or Machiavellian, people who are really willing to...
You know, harm others in order to get their way.
People who are like that are much more likely attracted to authoritarianism, mostly of the right, but also maybe of the left.
So you could say this Garcia character, I mean, he's almost by definition mentally ill and dysfunctional.
I mean, you don't engage in a crime like he engaged in, which of course led to his bloody demise.
If you aren't truly mentally disturbed.
He was kicked out of the army, apparently, for having some sort of mental illness.
And thus, he is attracted to something that can allow him to lash out.
There's a very interesting tidbit that was discovered.
By going through his OKRU account.
And he is, this is the one that was inspired by Libs of TikTok.
He discusses talking with his teacher in chemistry.
And he was shocked, you know, you're a chemistry teacher.
What are you doing talking about politics or whatever?
And he actually said to her, when she said good morning to him one day, he said, final solution.
And at one point he gave a Roman salute in front of her, and she was, of course, horrified by this.
And so becoming a Nazi in 2023 is...
Kind of the equivalent of listening to heavy metal when you're a teenager or dressing like a goth or dropping acid or what have you.
It's a way of achieving rebellion.
And people who are already psychopathic are going to be attracted to things like that.
I think there might also be another element to this in terms of causation.
Of a general, a glacially slow but perceivable shift of Hispanics to the right.
And a sense by Hispanics of being alienated and out of touch with culture.
So Hispanics don't get the kind of special adoration, say, that African Americans get.
They don't get affirmative action to the degree that African Americans do.
There's...
You can see a little bit of this, but they don't get the kind of George Floyd treatment of, you know, some terrible events like the death of George Floyd being amplified to a point where this represents the...
Sins of America, which we must purge through a BLM protest, etc.
And there certainly is a lot of anti-black racism among the Hispanic community.
You can probably say that you can find anti-black racism in every community.
And there's almost a way of, you know, this question of who am I?
You could see an Hispanic youth adopting a far-right posture in this rather extreme and outlandish way.
And what better way to express that you are white, or at the very least you're anti-black and anti-woman, than to just go full Nazi on their ass?
I think that has something to do with it.
Now, I would also be remiss, now that we're talking about causation, in pointing out two other things.
There's the proud boy element, and there's also this curious fact that this person was writing a kind of journal of sorts on a site called OKRU, one that I have...
I had never heard of until yesterday.
Now let's take the first one first.
So there was a series of events.
They're connected in terms of time.
Are they actually a sequence?
Are they connected in terms of causation?
I'm not sure, but I think they might be.
So last week, the...
The chief of the Proud Boys, Enrique Terrio, and other members of the Proud Boy leadership were convicted of a seditious conspiracy.
This is about as big a charge as you could really imagine.
They were convicted of conspiring to overturn the government on behalf of Now, here again, we see the Hispanic connection.
So, the Proud Boys were formed in 2018 by Gavin McGinnis.
Gavin is a man I knew quite a bit.
Actually, when I was editor over at Talkies Magazine in 2008-2009, I recruited him to be a writer.
And at that point, he was the founder of Vice.
Someone who had left Vice and someone who had expressed certain right-wing sentiments and was kind of the, you know, hipster, edgy kind of writer that I certainly wanted to attract when I was editing Taki's magazine.
He founded the Proud Boys in 2016, just before the election of Donald Trump.
It was certainly a way of, I guess you could say, it was inspired by the alt-right, but it might have been a way of, you could say, aping it or co-opting it or even stealing its thunder.
So it was a creation of a multiracial group, but one that was pro-West.
So the West is the best.
And all the rest is second best.
And in the words of Gavin McGinnis when he wrote to me about this in an email I read in my last, or two journal entries ago, he said that the West was built by white men, so, you know, we can have a multiracial group, but everyone knows what this is really about.
And maybe even implied in that was a notion of the Proud Boys' Using Hispanics and people of other races as frontmen, but maybe also as kind of foot soldiers for what is ultimately a white supremacist objective.
Gavin started this group in the most comical of...
I mean, the Proud Boys, when I first heard it, I thought it was a gay group, to be honest, but it wasn't, although there were gay members.
And it was based off a song from Aladdin, so it was all, you know, a Disney movie.
I mean, it was evoking something silly, a song about, you know, proud of your boy or something.
I can't remember the tune.
And they would...
To join, you could be initiated by naming 12 brands of cereal while they're punching you, or just some silly kind of frat-like behavior.
And it was presented as a kind of drinking club.
But...
As Gavin McGinnis was being interviewed by Joe Rogan and other people and on his own show, The Gavin McGinnis Show, he made it very clear that he was interested in violence.
He made statements that are indefensible, effectively, of if you see someone who looks like Antifa, go punch him in the face.
Some of us are going to get hurt doing this.
Some of us are going to die, but it's worth it.
Even in 2021, I remember seeing a comedy tour of Gavin where he was suggesting, if we all get arrested or we're all canceled from society, then that's good because then we're a real movement.
He's encouraging people to be self-destructive, to do things that are obviously illegal, to be aggressively violent.
Period.
End of statement.
There's no other way of interpreting his words.
He specifically said it was not defensive violence.
In 2018, there was a fistfight of some kind in New York, and many of the Proud Boys were arrested, and it was a major media event, although one that's certainly been forgotten by now.
And Gavin decided to step away.
And he rather implausibly claimed that, you know, people are saying that the Proud Boys are a gang, so if I step away, then it can't be a gang because there's not a leadership.
I mean, this seems to almost be the opposite of the truth in the sense that gangs certainly have a leader, a big alpha, but they are notable for being kind of...
consensual, almost kind of egalitarian.
I mean, that's kind of the nature of the gang.
It's actually organizations and corporations that have hierarchies and rankings and all that kind of It was clearly a way for Gavin to get out of legal exposure by leaving the organization.
And in his speeches, he would say things like, you know, how can we be called racist?
You know, look at this guy who's a proud boy.
He's got a black wife.
Something like that.
And shortly after that, Enrique Terrio was promoted.
He seems to have, well, I probably shouldn't guess at his heritage, but he seems to have Hispanic and even African heritage.
He's not conventionally white.
Let's put it that way.
As his name implies.
Terrio has had a lot of run-ins with the law.
He seemed to have been a FBI informant of some kind.
This is not involving politics.
And the Proud Boys did act as a kind of army in J6.
So they were there.
They were involved in the planning of it.
They were talking about violence.
They engaged in violence.
They had a distinct purpose, which was to stop the certification of the vote for president in order to keep Donald Trump in power.
They were engaged in a seditious conspiracy.
Now, it's one that had no chance of working.
It's one that was buffoonish as hell.
All of those things might very well be true, but it doesn't take away the fact that it was a conspiracy nevertheless.
So again, we have this situation of optics.
Let's put an Hispanic in charge as our front man.
No one can call us racist now.
That doesn't really work.
But also something...
The Proud Boys were easy to make fun of, but at the end of the day, they were an army on behalf of some purpose, whether that purpose is Trump, whether that purpose is mass violence, etc.
And it's just very curious that we have these Hispanics.
Hispanics that...
Are clearly of a certain kind of personality type.
They're attracted to outrageous ideologies.
They're involved with drugs, in the case of Terrio, in crime.
They are just outrageous people, and they're leading these white supremacist armies that are creating chaos in the United States.
So you might be able to see where I'm going with this one.
So what do we make of the fact that Garcia was blogging at a website called OKRU?
Now, I had never heard of this website until, you know, yesterday.
And the name of the website is So it's a Russian website.
And it just roughly translates to classmates.
So it's basically Facebook plus WordPress or something.
So why would he be using this kind of site?
And it's a non-rhetorical question in the sense that I really don't quite know the answer, but it does lend itself...
To some conspiratorial thinking in this regard.
You know, did you not want to use, I don't know, Tumblr or Facebook?
Or is it WordPress available for free?
Why are you using this Russian website that I've never heard of?
That no one's ever heard of?
Who was in that website with him?
Who was in his chat discussions?
Who was in his DMs on that website?
It's strange that it's Russian, isn't it?
So, what I'm suggesting, I don't know if this was a kind of Russian plot.
And real quick, we're reminded of these weird little tidbits.
Like the Buffalo shooter was in touch with a former FBI agent.
What does that mean?
What was going on there?
Was he being surveilled?
Is the FBI agent just a simpatico with his ideology?
What's going on there?
So what's going on here with this OKRU?
You could make the argument that there are forces out there That are able to locate and target people with serious mental disabilities.
Or a certain personality type, that dark triad type.
Those people who are psychopathic and feel entitled.
And are Machiavellian.
They're ready and willing to engage in some sort of violence.
Maybe even violence for its own sake, because it's fun for them.
That there's an ability to locate and target those types of people.
And then there's an ability to some degree to activate them.
You probably heard the term stochastic terrorism.
The way that that is usually used is that Ann Coulter will make some outrageous comment at CPAC, like, if the Republicans don't shape up, we're going to send the death squads after them.
And 99.9% of people who hear that either dismiss it, Think it's hilarious and great or think it's horrible and whatever, but they're not going to really do anything.
But there's that 0.01% that treats that as a call to arms and will actually engage in kinetic action in the real world.
So it's a kind of actuarial view of terrorism.
You're not directly paying someone to do an action.
You're kind of throwing out a wide net.
You're kind of crowdsourcing, as it were.
But there's maybe another way of thinking about that.
Yeah, Ann Coulter can say right-wing death squads or something, but you can also really directly and more immediately and more effectively engage people.
Through direct messaging, through camaraderie, through grooming, you could say, through that kind of false friendship that we all have online, Or someone who's our friend, who's not really our friend, and we don't really know?
How many accounts have responded to a tweet of yours, and then you've responded back, You start to kind of suspect that you're talking with someone from another country, or you might very well have just responded to a robot.
It's certainly not the majority of times.
It's fairly rare, but it certainly happened.
You know that there are accounts out there that are effectively bad actors.
Some of them wear it on their sleeves.
Some of them are clearly operative.
You don't know who the hell they are.
There's this interesting book called This Is Not Propaganda that was going through a lot of these accounts, actually in other countries outside the U.S. And these accounts would crop up.
They would become obsessed with an issue, like, let's say, a protest in Iran.
And they'd tweet 100 times a day about this issue.
And then they would go dark.
And then three months later, they would be obsessed about Donald Trump.
You know, tweet 100 times a day about him.
And then they'd go dark for a year.
And then this account would be revived.
And it's gaining followers all the while.
It's affecting people.
But it's clearly synthetic.
It's not just some dude in Nebraska tweeting his opinions after work.
It's operational and targeted.
And might this be happening on the level Of these psychopaths that are located and targeted.
Might someone find a person like Garcia, someone who's alienated, strange, has a pre-existing attraction to right-wing ideology, and start pushing him, start becoming his friend.
And then...
Might he have been activated on the weekend immediately following the conviction of the Proud Boys?
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