The man accused of opening fire on a Walmart in El Paso expressed fears that Hispanics in Texas are on their way to forming a powerful voting block that would ‘hasten the destruction of our country’ in a seething anti-immigrant manifesto shared online just 20 minutes before the shooting.
Patrick Crusius is believed to have carried out the deadly shooting at a Walmart at the Cielo Vista Mall, a popular shopping destination for people both sides of the US-Mexico border, on Saturday afternoon.
Authorities have labeled the attack, which left 20 dead and 26 more injured, an act of domestic terrorism and are considering hate crime charges against Crusius. The El Paso District Attorney’s Office has said it will pursue the death penalty.
Less than 20 minutes before the shooting, Crusius allegedly uploaded a twisted anti-immigrant manifesto to an online forum outlining his sickening motives and revealing he intended to target Hispanics.
The 2,300-word document titled ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ opened with the declaration: ‘This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.’
Crusius asserted that America is on its way to becoming a one-party state because Democrats are ‘pandering’ to the Hispanic voting bloc, which he fears will ‘replace’ Republican-leaning baby boomers.
He said the large Hispanic population in Texas, which is on pace to become the largest population group by 2022, according to the US Census Bureau, will turn the state into a ‘Democratic stronghold’, allowing the left to win ‘nearly every presidential election’.
‘Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs,’ he wrote.
‘They will turn Texas into an instrument of a political coup which will hasten the destruction of our country.’
Crusius allegedly shared a seething anti-immigrant manifesto less than 20 minutes before the shooting, revealing that he intended to target Hispanics. The suspect is seen left in a driver’s license photo and right in the back of a police cruiser after his arrest
Contrary to Crusius’ assertions, experts say Texas won’t turn into a blue state anytime soon.
Democrats’ decade-old dream of becoming the majority in the state gained promising momentum last November when former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke came within 2.6 percent of beating incumbent Sen Ted Cruz.
However, polling data revealed that O’Rourke’s near-victory came almost exclusively from white voters, rather than the state’s Hispanic population.
It showed that O’Rourke’s success came from his ability to woo people who would normally vote Republican or for third-party candidates, not from an increase in new voters.
Crusius’ manifesto also doesn’t mention that the Asian population is growing twice as fast as the Hispanic population.
Last year, Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident.
Census Bureau data released in June showed the Hispanic population climbed to nearly 11.4 million – an annual gain of 214,736 through July 2018 and an increase of 1.9 million since 2010.
The white population grew by just 24,075 in 2018 but is still larger than the Hispanic population at 11.9 million people.
Last year, Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident
Democrats’ decade-old dream of becoming the majority in the state gained promising momentum last November when former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke came within 2.6 percent of beating incumbent Sen Ted Cruz. However, polling data revealed that O’Rourke’s near-victory came almost exclusively from white voters, rather than the state’s Hispanic population. O’Rourke is seen outside the Walmart where the shooting took place on Sunday
The map above shows the distribution of counties voting for Beto O’Rourke (blue) and Ted Cruz (red) in the 2018 senate election
Crusius said his motivations for the attack are in large part ‘economic’ because he fears immigration will exacerbate ‘one of the biggest issues of our time’, automation.
He claimed that American jobs are already under threat from automation, the use of machines to replace workers and that allowing immigrants into the country will only make it harder for ‘natives’ to find jobs.
Crusius said that while new migrants typically ‘do the dirty work’ – referencing low-skilled labor such as farm work – ‘their kids typically don’t’.
‘They want to live the American Dream which is why they get college degrees and fill higher-paying skilled positions,’ he wrote.
‘This source of competition for skilled labor from immigrants and visa holders around the world has made a very difficult situation even worse for natives as they compete in the skilled job market.’
‘This has led to a generation of indebted, overqualified students filling menial, low paying, and unfulfilling jobs.’
Crusius revealed that his fears are deeply personal because the ‘job of his dreams’ will likely be automated, forcing him to compete for other jobs.
‘My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist,’ he wrote.
While the majority of Crusius’ manifesto targets Democrats, he also placed blame on Republicans for fueling immigration by supporting corporations that benefit from the cheap labor migrants provide.
In his manifesto Crusius predicted that ‘some people’ will blame Donald Trump for his attack, which he said ‘is not the case’. The president (above on Friday) condemned the shooting as ‘tragic’ and ‘an act of cowardice’
He said he thinks migrants come to America for economic reasons, not asylum, and that they are ‘willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive’.
Crusius also blamed Republicans for ‘anti-immigrant’ rhetoric which he says will ensure that immigrants vote Democrat.
At the very end of the document, Crusius predicted that ‘some people’ will blame President Donald Trump for his attack, which he said ‘is not the case’.
‘My ideology has not changed for several years,’ he wrote. ‘My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.’
He said that placing blame on the president will ‘confirm’ that the media is ‘fake news’.
He condemned ‘hypocrites’ who will label him a racist and white supremacist ‘despite the extensive evidence of all the problems these invaders will cause’.
Crusius said he feels his actions are ‘faultless’ because he thinks they will help spare America being ‘destroyed from the inside-out’.
‘I can no longer bear the shame of inaction knowing that our founding fathers have endowed me with the rights needed to save our country from the brink destruction,’ he writes, referencing the second amendment right to bear arms.
He acknowledged that some people will think his actions against the ‘invasion’ is hypocritical because America was built on the ‘complete ethnic and cultural destruction’ of Native Americans’, but said that fact ‘reinforces’ his point.
‘The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was,’ he wrote.
While he claimed he is not a racist, Crusius declared that he is against ‘race-mixing’, saying that it is ‘completely unnecessary and selfish’ and ‘destroys genetic diversity’.
He said ‘deporting or murdering all non-white Americans’ would be ‘horrific’, so the ‘best solution’ would be to ‘divide America into a confederacy of territories with at least one territory for each race’.
‘This physical separation would nearly eliminate race mixing and improve social unity by granting each race self-determination within their respective territory(s),’ he wrote.
Crusius is allegedly the man seen in surveillance footage walking into the Walmart wielding an AK-47 assault rifle
Crusius reportedly grew up 650 miles east of the shooting site in Allen, a wealthy and mostly-white suburb of Dallas.
He briefly attended Liberty High School in Frisco and went on to graduate from Plano Senior High School. He enrolled at Collin College, a community college in McKinney, in 2017.
A former neighbor of Crusius, Leigh Ann Locascio, said he was ‘very much a loner, very stand-offish’ and ‘didn’t interact a whole lot with anyone’, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Locascio, whose son Tony used to walk to school with Crusius and his sister, said the alleged shooter typically walked ahead or behind them, uninterested in interacting.
‘He wouldn’t talk to people. No one really knew him,’ Tony Locascio said. He recalled that Crusius liked animals and kept pet snakes.
Former classmate Jacob Wilson said Crusius was ‘very strong-minded’ during high school and would try to ‘take charge’ of other students, but many refused to work with him because he was ‘irritable and had a short temper’. He also allegedly spoke negatively of classmates who played sports or were in the school band.
Wilson said Crusius was bullied relentlessly by peers who targeted how he spoke and the fact that his clothes looked like hand-me-downs.
‘Every time I looked up in class it was someone new speaking negatively to the kid, ‘Patrick that is dumb, stupid,” Wilson said.
Daniel Heo of Plano, Texas, had a very different recollection of Crusius, whom he attended Beverly Elementary School with.
Heo said he remembers playing basketball and soccer with Crusius during recess, but they fell out of touch after elementary school.
He told The Times he hadn’t thought about Crusius in years until a friend texted him about the El Paso shooting and said his former classmate was a suspect.
‘I’m shocked. I remember him being a nice kid,’ Heo said.
Police was seen outside Crusius’ family home in Allen, Texas, on Saturday afternoon
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