A young man from the suburbs of Dallas drove ten hours to a Walmart in El Paso on a Saturday morning in August, when the back-to-school aisles were full, and killed twenty-three people. He wrote down why first. He used the word that had been in the air for a year.
The Cielo Vista Walmart is the kind of store where families from both sides of the border shop together, because in El Paso the border is a feature of daily logistics rather than a metaphor. On Saturday, August 3, Patrick Crusius walked in with a rifle and killed twenty-three people and wounded twenty-two more. The dead ranged from a fifteen-year-old boy to an eighty-six-year-old man. Eight of them were Mexican nationals doing their weekend shopping.
Minutes before, he uploaded a document. Its argument is not obscure and requires no interpretation.
The attack was "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
-- FROM THE DOCUMENT UPLOADED MINUTES BEFORE THE SHOOTING, AS QUOTED IN THE FEDERAL INDICTMENT
SOURCE: THIS PAGE, NOTE 1.
He identified himself in it as a white nationalist. He described wanting to discourage Hispanic immigration by making the country frightening. And he explained the drive: he selected a border city deliberately, which is why a young man from Allen, Texas, put 650 miles on his car to shop for victims.
I. THE CITY HE IMAGINED, AND THE ONE HE FOUND
Here is what makes El Paso the cruelest possible choice, and the most revealing.
El Paso is roughly 80 percent Hispanic. It is also, year after year, among the safest large cities in the United States, with a violent crime rate well below the national average and far below cities with a fraction of its immigrant population. It has been continuously inhabited and Spanish-speaking since the 1600s, which is to say it was Mexican, and Spanish, before it was Texan, and Texan before there was a United States to be invaded.
The "Hispanic invasion of Texas" is therefore an invasion of a place by the people who have always lived in it. The premise is not merely false; it is inside out. The only way to arrive at it is to be told, repeatedly, by sources you trust, that the presence of these particular Americans is itself an act of aggression.
II. THE WORD
Nine months before this, a man shot eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue after posting that a refugee agency "likes to bring invaders in that kill our people." The noun is the same. That is not a coincidence; it is a shared source.
"Invasion" is a term of art. It converts migration into war, migrants into combatants, and the response into self-defense. And by August 2019 it was not a fringe usage: it had been the organizing frame of the previous autumn's midterm campaign, it appeared in more than two thousand paid Facebook advertisements from the President's campaign this year alone, and it is used from the podium routinely. Three weeks ago the President told four congresswomen of color to "go back" to countries three of them were born in, and a rally crowd answered with "send her back."
This page will not claim anyone ordered this shooting, because no one did, and pretending otherwise would hand the argument to people who want it. The narrower claim is the one that survives scrutiny and is more damning: an American gunman reached for a word to justify mass murder, and the word he reached for was the one his country's political leadership had spent a year making ordinary. He did not have to go to a message board to find it. It was on the television at the airport.
CLAIM: "Politicians can't be blamed for what a lunatic does. He was mentally ill. Millions hear that language and don't shoot anyone."
THE RECORD: Both halves are true and neither is the point. Almost everyone who hears "invasion" does nothing, which is exactly how stochastic radicalization works: you do not need a high conversion rate when the audience is tens of millions. And whatever his psychiatric state, his stated reasoning was not gibberish... it was a coherent, widely circulated political theory applied consistently to a target chosen for its demographics. Mental illness explains why a person might act on a belief. It does not supply the belief. The belief has authors, and this week they are explaining that words have nothing to do with anything, which is a curious position for people whose entire profession is the use of words to move millions.
El Paso buried its dead this week under a banner reading El Paso Strong, in a city that has spent four centuries being the thing it is now accused of being invaded by. The theory that sent a stranger there is documented in this site's standing dossier. Its American body count is now thirty-four people in nine months.
SOURCES -- THIS PAGE
- The document, the "Hispanic invasion of Texas" phrase, the 650-mile drive and the deliberate selection of a border city, as described in the federal case: U.S. Department of Justice.
- The Texas Tribune on the attack and the city; contemporaneous El Paso reporting on the victims and the response.
- El Paso's demography and its standing among the safest large American cities: FBI Uniform Crime Reports and U.S. Census Bureau data for 2018 and 2019.
- The circulation of "invasion" in political advertising and rally rhetoric through 2018 and 2019, documented in contemporaneous analyses of campaign advertising archives.
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