In Allen, Texas, just outside Dallas, Mauricio Garcia pulled up in a car at an outlet mall where he killed eight people and wounded at least seven more.
Further south, in the town of Brownsville, George Alvarez drove through a redlight and plowed his SUV into a crowd of Venezuelans who had gathered near a migrant center. Authorities are unsure if is Alvarez was intoxicated but regardless he is charged with eight counts of manslaughter after hitting 18 people.
In the case of Garcia, The New York Times and left-wing activists allege he is a self-described Neo-Nazi sympathizer who used a Russian social media site to spew hate. In a timely “Hatewatch” article published Monday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the controversial organization described Garcia’s racist rantings before tying him to YouTube podcaster Tim Pool and the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. The accused mall killer allegedly complimented both in social media posts.
Curtis Houck of Media Research Center tells AFN the same media that is spending hours tracking down Garcia’s motive showed an amazing lack of curiosity after Audrey Hale gunned down six people at a Christian school in Nashville.
“It's very similar to some of these terrorist acts you would see in years past, decades past,” Houck says of Hale, “where it would be like the motivation of so-and-so may never be known.”
In a story published yesterday, AFN reminded readers that transgender activists and the media described Hale as a victim of Covenant School, even though she had attended two decades earlier. News stories and activists even blamed her Christian parents, guns, and Tennessee legislators after the disturbed transgender killed three adults and three small children in her school rampage.
The public has seen this twisted logic before. In 2017, when a gunman opened fire on Republican lawmakers practicing for a softball game, at least one bullet ripped through the stomach of Rep. Steve Scalise while he was playing infield.
“It’s a delicate thing because, obviously everybody is wishing the congressman well and hoping that he recovers,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid told her audience. “But Steve Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race.”
Going back farther, when Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb killed 168 people in Oklahoma City, then-President Bill Clinton blamed House Speaker Newt Gingrich and radio host Rush Limbaugh.
“They spread hate,” Clinton said four days after the attack. “They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."
Clinton’s poll-tested criticism of his political enemies was described in a 2011 Washington Examiner story after the tea party movement and Sarah Palin were blamed for the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabby Giffords.
After the mall attack, left-wing activists are excitedly tying Garcia to Tim Pool and to Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik. The influence of Pool’s podcasts and Raichik’s posts cannot be overstated. Pool is a disaffected liberal whose TimCast has 1.3 million subscribers. His videos have accumulated 838 million views since 2016.
On her Twitter account, Raichik reposts the TikTok posts of crazed school teachers to document the left-wing ideology they are espousing in public school classrooms. Her account has now grown to 2.1 million followers.
In a Twitter post that probably summarized the Far Left’s feelings, left-wing commentator Keith Olbermann said Pool and Raichick “got caught inspiring a mass murderer.”
On his YouTube show, however, Pool and his co-hosts said the Far Left is using the Allen mall tragedy to attempt to silence their opponents. Pool pointed to a Twitter conversation in which a Media Matters researcher blamed Raichik and Libs of TikTik for causing the shooting. Twitter was to blame too, the left-wing researcher argued, because it has not banned the channel.
"This is the Left's arguments for everything: Shut up or there will be more mass shootings," a co-host, responding to that Twitter post, commented.
“The whole point," a second co-host said, "is they want to connect anyone that would speak in a way that they do not approve of, which is essentially they're in control of, they want to link them to any kind of bad thing they can."
