By Laura Solomon
Hours before opening fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22, shooter Patrick Crusius uploaded a manifesto to the 8chan message board. Media and law enforcement immediately picked up on the manifesto as clear evidence of his motive: racist hate.
Certainly, it is important to acknowledge that Crusius intentionally targeted Hispanics, and that this community has suffered disproportionately on account of his attacks. Crusius openly stated that Hispanics were his target and drove ten hours from his home near Dallas to the border city of El Paso, home to a major Hispanic population, in search of victims.
However, Crusius’s attack also needs to be understood in the context of an escalating phenomenon of mass shootings that defies easy explanation. In the wake of a mass shooting, perpetrators are often typecast in the media by the victims they claim. In the last year alone, we have witnessed a bewildering number of mass shooters in 37 states associated with a variety of motives, including white supremacy, transphobia, male supremacy or “incel” ideology.
The motives of mass shooters vary widely, but the propensity to massacre is shared.
If we are to prevent future shootings of this kind, we need to better understand the cultural environment in which these shooters are radicalized to commit violence. In addition to racial prejudice, Crusius’s attack needs to be understood in the context of an escalating phenomenon — domestic terrorists whose ultimate motive is achieving high victim counts, or killing the most people.
After analyzing Crusius’s manifesto, I found that only 13% of its content was devoted to anti-Hispanic rhetoric. The other 87% dealt with Crusius’s insecurities about the current state of the world — fears of global warming, the power of corporations, the prospect of a one-party political state, and automation supplanting human jobs.
In the opening paragraph of his manifesto, Crusius states that he had not originally planned to target Hispanics. Referring to the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s Manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” he wrote, “My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement” [sic]. Note that Crusius explicitly says that his target changed, but the intent to commit mass violence did not. In other words, Crusius’s desire to commit mass violence preceded his choice of target.
“Crusius explicitly says that his target changed, but the intent to commit mass violence did not. In other words, his desire to commit mass violence preceded his choice of target.”
Crusius’s shifting target, but steadfast commitment to the act itself, is the potential harbinger of a new age of mass shootings in which violence could be a standalone motivation. The El Paso shooting was the 7th deadliest shooting in US history. In the world of user message boards like 8chan, the online community whom Crusius referred to as “brothers,” this statistic matters.
On these platforms, gamer rhetoric is applied liberally to all incidents of mass violence. Victim counts are referred to as “high scores” and “digits.” Just as in a video games, a mass shooter’s value is determined by the number of lives that he claims. The Sandyhook shooting, for example, is applauded for its alleged “perfect kill ratio” — meaning that every bullet found a target, a human life. Robert Evans of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism outfit, has coined the term “gamification of mass shootings” to refer to this phenomenon.
While many dismiss the existence of any link between mass shootings and video game violence, citing an absence of proof from social science studies, there is increasingly a hard-to-ignore pattern of mass shooters acknowledging how much time they spend online playing video games. Gamer culture is the lifeblood of message boards like 8chan and 4chan, where shooters like Crusius and Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz spent their time, and ultimately shared their intentions. Crusius is the third shooter this year to share his manifesto on 8chan.
Neighbors of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz claimed he spent as much as 15 hours a day playing video games. Tarrant, the Chirstchurch shooter, live-streamed his massacre on Facebook to a soundtrack he prepared for the occasion, resulting in a point of view perspective mirroring a player’s experience in first-person shooter games. In his manifesto, Tarrant wrote, “Fortnite trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies.”
To ignore the pattern that technologies play in incidents of domestic terrorism is to ignore an important cultural element that could be influencing would-be shooters. The gamification of mass shootings makes the massacre of innocents a competition — a game. In a world that is populated by many social outcasts, shooters like Crusius see themselves as experts.
In his manifesto, Crusius explicitly referenced Call of Duty (COD), a popular first-person shooter game. This is one of only two instances in which Crusius used second-person pronouns (“you”) in his manifesto. The result reads like a “how-to” manual for future shooters, and an indication that Crusius considered himself an authority in killing. He wrote: “Remember: it is not cowardly to pick low hanging fruit. AKA Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy.”
In Call of Duty, players can die and respawn, causing players sometimes to attack enemies recklessly. Crusius’s warnings to be more cautious in real life may be an implicit reference to the June 17th Dallas shooting by Brian Isaac Clyde, an alleged incel who attempted to enter a Dallas courthouse armed and was fatally shot by three federal officers. (Clyde, too, was a gamer. He indicated on social media that he played first-person shooter games for so long that it induced migraines). Living in a Dallas suburb, Crusius would have known about Clyde and deemed his attack a failure. On 8chan message boards that Crusius may have frequented, Clyde was mocked for his “low score.”
It’s clear from Crusius’s manifesto that he didn’t intend to “fail” like Clyde. He included a section on his choice of weapon (AK-47) and his intent to die in action. As an active member of 8chan and a self-professed follower of Christchurch shooter Tarrant (who was in turn inspired by the 2011 Norway attacks), Crusius had no doubt recognized that “successful” mass shootings shared two characteristics — high victim count and a published manifesto. The haphazardness of Crusius’s manifesto is enough to suggest that he likely determined that he needed a manifesto before he decided on what his justification for the shooting would be, and before he had picked a target population. In his own words: “I have to do this before I lose my nerve. I figured that an under-prepared attack and a meh manifesto is better than no attack and no manifesto.” To Crusius, a manifesto, no matter how “meh,” was integral to the execution of his plan.
Perhaps for that reason, Crusius’s manifesto reads less like a manifesto and more like a failed term paper. While 13% of the content by word count is devoted to anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, almost a third bemoans the power of corporations and an automated future. Crusius feared that technology would displace American workers, and that immigration would exacerbate the problem. He mentions “Hispanics” 11 times, “invaders” 4, “immigration” 9, and “race-mixing” 4, for a total of 28 instances of white supremacist rhetoric. He mentions “corporation” 13 times, “automation” 5, and joblessness or the job market 13 times, for a total of 31 instances of rhetoric about economic conditions.
Also crucial is what Crusius doesn’t say. Although he explicitly expresses disgust for “race mixing,” he only uses the term “white” twice, in direct contrast with the manifestos of his predecessors, who use the term “white genocide” liberally. The first use is to acknowledge that many Hispanics have been in the country longer than their white counterparts, a rare moment of empathy toward his target that is largely uncharacteristic of white supremacist culture. The second instance is an expression of fear that the media would label him a white supremacist. In view of this remark, it is important to explore the discrepancy between Crusius’s alleged anti-Hispanic motive and the content of his manifesto, not to absolve him for his hateful crimes, but to understand that his motivations were more complex than has been initially suggested.
At 21-years old, Crusius belongs to “Gen Z,” digital natives described as “a more educated, well-behaved, stressed and depressed generation.” Coming of age in a post-9/11 world, shaped by the economic recession and unrelenting mass shootings, the hallmark of Gen Z is economic and physical insecurity. True to his generation, Crusius’s uncertainty about the future shines through in his writing.
For example, Crusius was worried about his future employment. He was looking for technology jobs on LinkedIn. He wrote: “It used to be that a high school degree was worth something. Now a bachelor’s degree is what’s recommended to be competitive in the job market. The cost of college degrees has exploded as their value has plummeted.”
Crusius also mentions the destruction of the environment four times and devotes a half-page to fears of urban sprawl, deforestation and physical waste. His manifesto is titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” an obvious call-back to Al Gore’s canary-in-the-coal mine documentary on climate change, and he also urges readers to watch “The Lorax,” a film based on a Dr. Seuss book about environmental destruction. “My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. The environment is getting worse by the year.”
In Crusius’s warped view at the time of the shooting, the world is going to hell, so he might as well die in a blaze of glory.
And yet, Crusius set out to murder Hispanics specifically. Noting that he couldn’t bring himself to kill “Americans,” he attempted to connect his hatred of corporations and American political systems to Hispanics. The result is a four-page effort to justify his target, and to connect his motive to that of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. Crusius is a product of the online culture of 8chan in which he chose to immerse himself, in which the massacre of innocents is a competition, and brutality a prize worth dying for.
That Patrick Crusius is a white supremacist who sought to murder Hispanics is undeniable. But we cannot ignore that Crusius sought to kill first, then selected a victim.
Because Crusius’s desire for violence seems to have preceded his selection of Hispanics as a target, he may be a part of a new generation of terrorists, avatar killers who make gamer culture come to life with human targets. For these killers, the glory of high victim-counts combined with general anxiety about the state of the world are enough to pull the trigger.
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