Abstract: On May 6, 2023, Mauricio Garcia, a man with longstanding neo-Nazi views, murdered eight people in a mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall in Allen, Texas. He was shot dead by police. Though investigators are still probing the deceased gunman’s motivations, this article examines all the available information regarding Garcia’s modus operandi, the nexus between extreme far-right ideas and misogyny prevalent in Garcia’s writings, and the complex roles of race and mental health in the attack. Garcia had an ideologically fuzzy tapestry of extreme thoughts tied to rampant violence. He appeared to view neo-Nazis and other members of the extreme far-right as living the “real” masculine ideal in its fullest form by their commitment to generating dominance through violent, radical, racial, and cultural action. This interaction between race and gender is an increasingly present aspect of far-right violence and needs to be better understood.
On May 6, 2023, 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, a man with longstanding neo-Nazi views, murdered eight people and injured seven more in a mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall in Allen, Texas, a suburb approximately 20 miles north of Dallas. A policeman shot him dead at the scene before he could cause further bloodshed. It was the second mass shooting in Texas in little over a week1 and the sixth in the state this year.2 It is, at the time of publication, the second deadliest mass shooting in the United States in 2023.3
Mauricio Garcia dressed in black for the attack and wore body armor with numerous magazines attached to its chest rig. He had affixed a patch that read “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad”a—to his body armor alongside two “Punisher” motifs.4 Although he was dressed in quasi-paramilitary garb, Garcia had little military experience. Aged 18 in June 2008, Garcia had entered basic training as an infantryman at Fort Benning but was expelled after three months due to concerns about his mental health. The Army discharged Garcia before he could receive rifle training, and so it is unclear whether prior military experience was a factor in the lethality of his attack.5 Although Garcia had little military experience, his social media posts and diary entries indicate that he regularly visited firing ranges to practice discharging his weapon.
Garcia planned his killings for some time. He extensively researched his target, Allen Premium Outlets, and posted numerous photographs of the building and its parking lot on his Odnoklassniki (OK) (a Russian social media site that translates to “classmates”) profile on April 16, 2023. These posts included screenshots of Google geo-location information—indicating he had previously visited the mall on May 14, 2022, January 7, 2023, and April 15, 2023—and another screenshot showing the mall’s busiest times and an indoor map of the facility.6 This approach was similar to that of the Buffalo, New York, shooter, who also conducted extensive research on his target (a supermarket frequented by Black patrons) prior to his attack and utilized Google’s “popular time” feature to select the best time to carry out his attack.7 The Allen, Texas, shooting is another example of a racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism incident taking place at a retail location, as opposed to a place of worship, for example. Large retail locations are becoming one of the preferred soft targets for those seeking to carry out a mass casualty attack.b
On the day of the attack, Garcia posted a short video of himself on YouTube wearing a “Scream” mask, which he then removed. “Not quite what you were expecting, huh?” he said on the video.8 An ardent white supremacist, Garcia was also of Hispanic heritage. Twenty-four minutes before the shooting, Garcia reportedly emailed a rock singer links to his YouTube and OK profiles.9 This deviates from other extreme right-wing mass shooters, who tend to post their propaganda content and manifestos on image boardsc and mainstream social media sites.10
Unlike several recent right-wing violent extremists, Garcia did not livestreamd his rampage. Dashcam footage from a bystander’s vehicle that circulated online in the aftermath of the massacre showed Garcia exiting a vehicle in the parking lot of Allen Premium Outlets and immediately beginning to shoot at people on the sidewalk.11 Garcia murdered eight people and injured seven more. At 3:36pm local time, an Allen police officer, who was at the mall on an unrelated call, “heard gunshots, went to the gunshots, engaged the suspect, and neutralized the suspect,” according to the Allen Police Department.12 After Garcia’s death, police recovered “multiple weapons” at the scene, “including an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun.”13 One report recorded police recovering four firearms.14
Prior to the attack, the gunman had posted pictures to his OK profile of at least four different pistols, two assault rifles, and a pump-action shotgun with photographs of large amounts of ammunition and his chest rig (which, in one photo, contained 16 ammunition clips—indicative of a capacity for carnage he was ultimately unable to achieve). Garcia also posted online the electronic receipts for two 9mm pistols (a Beretta and a Sig Sauer) and a Kalashnikov USA KR-103, totaling $3,217.29. Garcia bought the firearms online in three separate transactions in June 2022.15
In the aftermath of the attack, eyewitnesses recalled truly horrifying scenes.16 Garcia’s victims included three children aged 11, eight, and three.17 These numbers fail to convey the scale of multiple personal tragedies. Ilda Mendoza, who was critically injured during the shooting, lost her two daughters: Daniela, aged 11, and Sofia, aged eight. A six-year-old boy wounded in the massacre was orphaned. The gunman killed both the boy’s parents, Cho Kyu Song and Kang Shin Young, and his three-year-old brother, James. The dead included Aishwarya Thatikonda, a 26-year-old Indian engineer who was visiting the mall with a friend; Elio Cumana-Rivas, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who had arrived in Dallas less than a year ago seeking to escape violence in his own country; and Christian LaCour, a mall security guard, aged 20.18
Garcia’s own death leaves many questions unanswered. Did he select his victims on ideological or racial grounds, or target them indiscriminately? Did he choose Allen as the site for the killings because of its racial diversity? With a population of about 105,000 residents, Allen is among Dallas-Fort Worth’s most diverse areas. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Allen’s population as of July 2022 was about 19.2% Asian, 9.6% Black and 11.2% Hispanic/Latino.19
This is not the first time that the city of Allen has featured in an extreme right-wing terrorist attack. In August 2019, Patrick Crusius, who lived in Allen, drove 650 miles from his home to El Paso, Texas, where he murdered 23 people at a shopping mall.20 Crusius pled guilty to 90 federal charges earlier this year; a judge will sentence him at the end of June.21 This latest attack is part of a broader trend that is contributing to a “heightened threat environment” nationally and internationally, notes a recent DHS National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) bulletin.22
This article examines the radicalization of Mauricio Garcia, making use of hundreds of pages of his handwritten diary, as well as his posts on the social media platform Odnoklassniki (often abbreviated as OK or OK.ru). These posts were manually collected by the authors from Garcia’s OK profile. OK was founded in 2006 by Albert Popkov and has become one of the most popular platforms in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, after Vkontakte and Facebook.23 The authors also take a close look at the roles of race, gender, and misogyny, which are interwoven into the shooter’s discussion of grievance and foundational to his ideological identifications.
The Radicalization of Mauricio Garcia
Garcia left a sizable online footprint, though it appears to be a socially isolated one. A preliminary review by officials “found that the gunman’s social media posts were not liked or shared by other users.”24 Though Garcia did not leave a manifesto—manifestos have become hallmarks of many violent right-wing extremist attackse—he did keep a diary. This handwritten document dates from approximately 2013 onward, and Garcia appears to have individually scanned over 300 pages and uploaded them to his OK profile. His first post on OK is dated April 2, 2020. From this first post to the date of the attack, he presumably refrained from adding to his handwritten diary and only posted material to his online profile.
It is notoriously difficult to trace an individual’s radicalization trajectory by reading only their social media posts, but Garcia’s case has proven especially complex. His diary is, to put it mildly, all over the place. Garcia’s diary contains over 300 pages and a mix of stories about arguments with his former bosses and co-workers, almost getting into fistfights of his own imagining with people walking past him, dozens of pop culture references, concert experiences, experiences with women, musings about the sexual prowess of different racial groups, notes on how sexually aroused he is by nurses at the hospital who “wait on me hand and foot,” stories about masturbating to different women he had met, as well as a critique of his own Hispanic community’s politics around privilege, socio-economic status, and relationship to the white majority. Anyone who tries to pinpoint a single ideological driver will not find it. There is no clear audience for his diary entries; like any “dear diary” entry, the audience is the writer himself. Unlike other extreme far-right attackers, Garcia’s diary makes clear that he is not isolated; there are endless stories about his place of employment, going to social gatherings and parties, attending concerts, and even meeting people he enjoys being around.
In one undated diary entry, he recalls feeling shunned by the Hispanic community growing up, which caused him to “lean far-right.” Reflecting on this later, Garcia writes that “there was a time when I wished I was white, it was because my own race was treating me like shit.” In the late 2000s, Garcia watched the film American History X (1998)—a film about a violent Nazi who, after being imprisoned for murdering two men, tries to prevent his brother, who hero-worships him, from following in his footsteps25—and began to identify with some of the lines and characters in the movie. “I used to think no one thought like me,” he writes, “but after watching the movie, I knew I wasn’t alone.” From here, Garcia seems to have gone down an online rabbit hole; he described visiting white supremacist and fascist websites like American Renaissance, Vdare, and the Daily Stormer. After joining the Army, he wrote, he had discovered that white people in the military “weren’t the racist [sic] the media made them out to be.”
While his narrations of personal interactions with people of color are often littered with derogatory and racist labels, it seems evident that much of this is driven by a personal animosity toward the individual he is talking about as opposed to the group as a whole. This is evidenced by other people of color he wrote about glowingly in the diary who happened to be nice to him and “gave him a chance.”
In addition to nearly 10 years of written diary pages, Garcia’s online footprint consists of approximately three years of posts on OK. The content on this social media page is less erratic than his diary pages, but still lacks a coherent theme. There are photos of parking lots, shooting ranges, his meals, favorite movies, and boxes of ammunition he had purchased. In January 2022, Garcia posted a series of photos of Nazi flags, Punisher imagery,f images from a 2010 protest in Mexico City organized by the Nationalist Front of Mexico, and images from a 2018 protest against Honduran immigration to Mexico organized by Mexican far-right nationalist groups. On June 6, 2022, Garcia posted a screenshot from Dropbox about how he had downloaded the Buffalo shooter’s livestreamed attack video.
Just as easily as he posted decontextualized photos of far-right protests in Mexico, Garcia posted discussions of his masculinity, specifically his “confidence score” obtained from a kind of New Age human potential website tinged with male victimhood and manosphereg talking points. On September 1, 2022, for example, Garcia posted that “My mother, sister, AND FATHER, mocked any attempt I made to be masculine throughout my childhood and teenage years and they continue to do so today. You wanna lift weights? ‘Muscles are weird and gross’. I’ve never, and mean literally never, been in the same room with my mom, dad and sister without my mom and sister talking down to my father.”
Garcia used his OK social media page in a similar manner to how he used his handwritten diary—not as a social networking tool.h This is similar to how the Buffalo shooter used Discord as a diary.26 At times, Garcia’s posts are lists of article titles that have no apparent relationship. For example, a post from early September 2022 contains an article about Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland high school shooter, receiving love letters in prison; an article about how much money truck drivers make; and several derogatory statements about Jews and African Americans. As such, Garcia makes it easy for analysts to pick and choose posts from nearly a decade of content to attach him to a series of individual ideologies. The authors argue, however, that this misses the point. The point is that Garcia was immersed in an entire ecosystem, with one viewpoint feeding into and reifying the next. His attachment to any one ideology is less important—and fuzzier—than how each feeds into his broader tapestry of belief. It is a tapestry that must be viewed from a distance to understand the coherence of the image created by its various threads.
After reading through nearly a decade of diary entries and online posts, if the authors were to try to pinpoint two main ideological drivers, they would likely be the manosphere and the extreme far-right, more specifically the interplay between the two online. While there is much scholarship noting the intimate relationship between misogyny and the extreme far-right,27 it seems likely that, for Garcia, members of the extreme far-right symbolize the ultimate “confident” men. According to him, they not only stand up for men, but also their culture, and are not afraid to fight for it. For Garcia, these ultra-confident men are what women find attractive. While the masculinity of the extreme far-right is positioned as the hierarchical apex, the notions of prioritizing the relationship between men and women as markers of male status through sexual conquest clearly come from manosphere narratives, particularly the framing of Pick-Up Artists (PUAs) and misogynist involuntary celibates (incels).
In a bizarre reversal of incel ideology, which is heavily focused on genetic determinism, Garcia claims in a post on OK that good-looking and muscular men are not actually the bearers of “real” manhood. Rather, because such men are so biologically privileged, they have a difficult time navigating hardship and are thus incapable of engaging in the “real fight.” Garcia wrote in the same post on OK: “This is one of the disadvantages chads [biologically privileged men] have. When you are genetically blessed, you are totally spoiled, and your psyche is essentially as weak as a woman’s. Even the slightest pitfalls are enough to send them into endless suicidal depression.” For Garcia, it seems, neo-Nazis and other members of the extreme far-right live the “real” masculine ideal in its fullest form by their commitment to generating dominance through violent, radical, racial, and cultural action. This interaction between race and gender is worth unpacking more, as it is an increasingly present aspect of far-right violence.
Gender and the Construction of Ideology
Much has been made of Garcia’s use of misogyny in his online postings and diary writings, and it is indeed startling. His statements are both casually cruel and intensely violent. In one post, he said the rejection he has experienced has enraged him to the point that even if he got a perfect “high value” woman, he “would just not have the capacity to love her. Even if she loved me, I would want to inflict as much pain as I could on her, I would want to rape her as a final act of revenge on behalf of all whores.” While this is shocking, it is all too common in the digital fora of so-called “red pill” cultures (the manosphere and far-right extremists among them) online.i Crucially, though, little attention has been paid to how Garcia’s understanding of gender is the root of his misogynist expressions. Stepping back from Garcia’s salacious misogyny to explore his wider, gendered worldview reveals a use of racialized misogyny to construct an idealized vision of masculinity through his linkage of gendered and racialized supremacist ideology.
Research has shown that propaganda and radicalization to extremist views are often driven by or deeply intertwined with gender-based grievances, though narrative constructions of those grievances can differ between white and male supremacist cultures.28 In the digital context, gendered discourses, specifically notions of (white) male precarity, anti-feminism, transmisogyny, and homophobia, are used by manosphere and extreme far-right influencers and propagandists to present whites, men, and traditional women as under threat in the contemporary world. Here, red pill narratives and propaganda help to circulate gender-based grievances between a variety of extremist and extreme-adjacent digital spaces.
This digital engagement creates interaction between white supremacist, fascist, and male supremacist cultures as they consume the same media (i.e., propaganda and content), and debate each other, primarily through their shared focus on gender, misogyny, and anti-feminism. Garcia’s content, specifically his writings and posts, highlights this cross-pollination between digital hate cultures and how it constructs a particularly violent and dominant masculinity. One of his posts discussed the March 2023 Nashville school shooter (grammar and spelling from original post):
So the Nashville shooting was particularly interesting because a bitch broke the ER barrier (with a decent kill score) for the first time. This is like the greatest accomplishment of feminism ever, for a foid, even though a tranny, but still a vagina haver, to feel so empowered that they could take it upon themselves to pick themselves up by the bootstraps, get their gear in order, and successfully go ER is a moment Valerie Solanas would be proud of. Only feminism could have taken biological women to the logical extreme of embodying the highest pinnacles of toxic masculinity.
Blending the deep transmisogyny of extreme far-right ideology with the violent and misogynist language of the incelosphere, in the above quoted post Garcia glorified the violence of the Nashville attack in which the assailant, a transgender man, murdered three nine-year-old children and three adults on March 27, 2023, at a Christian elementary school where he had been a former pupil.29 Garcia reclaimed this violence as a province of masculinity by positioning the act as the result of feminism run amok to the point that it actually crosses sides in the battle between left and right positions in the culture wars online. His reference to bootstraps is an interesting nod to ideals of meritocracy, typically reserved for racial discourse in the United States. Here, however, he applied it to overcoming gender-based marginalization. Finally, he hit on a very “manosphere” reference to Valerie Solanas, the author of the SCUM Manifesto—a violent, radical feminist tract from the late 1960s—most famous for her attempt to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.30 Perhaps the most telling line is the last line, where mass murder (violence) is characterized as a logical extreme and the pinnacle of toxic masculinity (a positive thing in Garcia’s usage). Implicitly, then, Garcia was arguing that violent action is a mode of overcoming marginality and achieving masculinity.
Examining Garcia’s construction of ideal masculinity and proper manhood is critical to understanding his use of violence in language and in action. He repeatedly constructed “ideal” masculinity as highly dominant, using violence as a corrective against women and other “lesser” peoples, with Aryan (e.g., white fascist) men portrayed as the apotheosis of “proper” manhood. Because gender is constructed as a binary system in both extreme far-right and manosphere cultures, Garcia had to also narratively construct masculinity by saying what it is not, and that is feminine. So, he did this by also repeatedly narrating femininity as “evil” via slurs and assertions that all women are users and destroyers of men. He blended this with the regular use of the incel-specific derogatory term “foid,” a shorthand for “femoid,” indicating that women are soulless, and not, in fact, human beings.31 Finally, in his writings Garcia depicted women as sexualized objects, articulating at great length his fixation with sex, pornography, and punishing women by violently raping them. These constructions position violence as the path to manhood and women as acceptable objects of violence enacted by “real” men.
Ultimately, Garcia in his writings presented women as markers of male status, whether as sexual objects or as lesser beings to be dominated and controlled through violence—a common notion within the manosphere. This narration provided a lens through which Garcia could construct his preference for and discussions in his diary about feminine submissive behavior as sexually appealing, including his posts about nurses who “waited on him hand and foot” (mentioned above) and about Asian women specifically. Linking this gendered worldview with his racial worldview (where Aryan masculinity is the peak of manhood) also provides a lens to understand his focus on Asian women, who are stereotyped as more submissive, and his obssesive hatred of Asian men.32 With women as markers of male status and Aryanism as the apogee of manhood, race itself becomes a hierarchical currency accrued in sexually violent terms. Here, dominating women confers masculine status. This is particularly true if a man can dominate high-status women. In these particular extremist ideologies, whiteness and high-status femininity are often linked such that Asian women are often portrayed as of higher status than other women of color.33 Garcia could leverage this economy through his portrayal of desire to dominate high-status women in an effort to offset a perceived loss of masculine status from his own racial and ethnic identity.
In the end, an ideologically fuzzy tapestry of extreme thoughts tied to rampant violence does not fit neatly into traditional (racial) or newer (misogynist) categories of extremism. However, it is essential to widen beyond misogyny to view how gender, as a more complex category, shapes relationships with race, violence, and action. With respect to the Allen, Texas, attack case, the uncharacteristic usage of ideological frames and terminologies highlights how useful an intersectional analysis is for studying identity-based supremacy and extremism. In this case, an intersectional analysis shows how gender and race mutually constitute and reinforce each other in ways that can produce violence.
Conclusion
Two aspects of the Allen, Texas, attack and the radicalization of Garcia, the assailant, are worth highlighting, as they may represent future trends within the extreme far-right.
The first noteworthy aspect of the attack is the difficulty of linking it to a particular ideology given the mixture of references, languages, and symbols the attacker writes about. However, in this case, the ideological mixture can be analyzed through Garcia’s cross-linking grievances around gender. As such, this case highlights the need to develop new methods of assessment and exploration (such as intersectional analysis) to better understand ideological drivers and violence. As noted above, Garcia appears to have been deeply immersed in the manosphere and a variety of extreme far-right narratives, but seemingly was not committed to anything in particular. Ideologically specific terminology was used, but these ideas were rarely developed or articulated at length. Researchers have previously sought to explain this broad and increasingly common phenomenon with terminology like “ideological convergence,”34 “fringe fluidity,”35 or “salad bar” extremism.36 The challenge the authors found with all of these conceptual frameworks, especially with respect to Garcia’s online material, is that, even while acknowledging that radicalized individuals may hold multiple ideologies, these frameworks still assume that an individual’s commitment to particular ideologies is strong. In Garcia’s case, his commitment seems to be stronger toward violence and casual in relationship to ideologies.
The second noteworthy aspect of the Allen, Texas, attack case is the issue of race. Judging by social media conversations following the attack, the fact that Garcia was not white but had Nazi tattoos caused a fracturing in the discourse. For some, it was clear evidence that analysts and journalists on the “left” were too quick to label the incident a far-right attack. For others, it was evidence of a false flag. While these ideologies claiming white racial superiority have been historically associated with white supremacist movements, it is crucial to recognize that they are not exclusive to any particular racial or ethnic group. There are complex intersections between racial or ethnic identity, nationalism, and socio-political factors that contribute to the adoption of such ideologies. In reality, the phenomenon of people of color joining extreme far-right movements is not new at all.
Scholars such as Cecilia Marquez have traced Latino involvement in white supremacist movements back to the 1980s.37 Indeed, as Hannah Allam and Razzan Nakhlawi have reported, many right-wing activists argue that the real racism is “denying them the agency to follow whatever ideology they choose – no matter how repugnant it is to liberals.”38 People of color in extreme far-right circles include former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who in May 2023 was found guilty of seditious conspiracy in relation to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.39 It also follows that lone actors from among these circles will also periodically engage in violent action. These instances serve as reminders that racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism can transcend what the general public perceives as normative racial boundaries, requiring comprehensive efforts to address the underlying social, economic, and political factors that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence.
Extreme far-right movements that are not explicitly white supremacist attract people of color. Relatedly, as noted above, notions about gender and sexuality, including misogynist attitudes, often transcend racial boundaries. As Daniel Hosang and Jospeph Lowndes have written, “Performed as patriarchal traditionalism, online ultra-misogyny, or street-brawling bravado, masculinity bridges racial differences for populist, fascist, and even white-nationalist politics.”40 Grasping this dynamic in all its complexity is crucial for understanding future attacks in this space. CTC
Ashley A. Mattheis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC) in the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University. Her areas of interest include gender, extremism, and digital cultures including the ‘Manosphere,’ the Far and Alt-Right, and #Tradwives with a goal of better understanding how gendered logics are used to promote racial hate, discrimination, and violence. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Amarnath Amarasingam is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion, and is cross-appointed to the Department of Political Studies, at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. His research interests are in terrorism, radicalization and extremism, online communities, diaspora politics, post-war reconstruction, and the sociology of religion. Twitter: @AmarAmarasingam
Graham Macklin is a researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has published extensively on extreme right-wing and anti-minority politics in Britain and North America in both the inter-war and post-war periods. His most recent books include Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (2020) and the co-edited collection Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method & Practice (2020). He co-edits the academic journal Patterns of Prejudice and the Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right book series. Macklin is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS). He is currently completing a book on extreme right-wing terrorism. Twitter: @macklin_gd
Marc-André Argentino is a Senior fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium. He is also a senior research advisor with the Government of Canada’s Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Government of Canada. Twitter: @_MAArgentino
© 2023 Mattheis, Amarasingam, Macklin, Argentino
Substantive Notes
[a] The “RWDS” patch on Garcia’s body armor derived from a slogan popular within the alt-right milieu from around 2017 onward. Groups like the Proud Boys whose members have been photographed wearing such patches helped to popularize it. See Darragh Roche, “Ex-Proud Boy Regrets Wearing ‘RWD’’ Patch After Texas Shooting: ‘Horrified,’” Newsweek, May 9, 2023. The phrase, which appeared on shields at the violent Charlottesville protest in 2017, has its origin in the glorification of South American right-wing death squads that operated during the 1970s and 1980s. Chile’s General Pinochet was a figure singled out for veneration as reflected in the visual aesthetic of the milieu, which produced T-shirts proclaiming, “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong.” See “RWDS/Right Wing Death Squad,” ADL, n.d.
[b] Recent examples include the Cascade mall shooting in Washington in September 2016, the July 2022 shopping mall shooting in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the July 2022 mass shooting in Greenwood, Indiana. See “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021,” FBI, May 2022.
[c] An image board is an online forum where users often post images along with text and engage in longer discussion. They started in Japan, but are now prevalent elsewhere. The most famous of these image boards are 4Chan and 8Chan (now known as 8kun).
[d] Several recent mass casualty shootings have been livestreamed by the attackers themselves. These include the Christchurch attack, the Halle Germany shooting, and the Buffalo shooting. See Graham Macklin, “The Christchurch Attacks: Livestream Terror in the Viral Video Age,” CTC Sentinel 12:6 (2019); Daniel Koehler, “The Halle, Germany, Synagogue Attack and the Evolution of the Far-Right Terror Threat,” CTC Sentinel 12:11 (2019); and Amarnath Amarasingam, Marc-Andre Argentino, and Graham Macklin, “The Buffalo Attack: The Cumulative Momentum of Far-Right Terror,” CTC Sentinel 15:7 (2022).
[e] Such as the El Paso shooting, the Halle Germany shooting, the Christchurch attack, as well as the Buffalo shooting. See Jacob Ware, “Testament to Murder: The Violent Far-Right’s Increasing Use of Terrorist Manifestos,” ICCT Policy Brief, March 2020.
[f] The Punisher skull image was originally developed by Marvel Comics as a kind of anti-hero to Spider-Man. This image was later adopted by certain members of the American military. In recent years, the symbol has been used by local law enforcement as well as members of the Proud Boys and other far-right movements. See Rebecca Collard, “How a Marvel Comic Hero Became the Icon of the Fight Against ISIS,” Time, April 13, 2015. See also Sean Thielman, “How do you stop the far-right using the Punisher skull? Make it a Black Lives Matter symbol,” Guardian, June 11, 2020.
[g] The ‘manosphere’ is an umbrella term that refers to a number of interconnected misogynistic communities. It encompasses multiple types and severities of misogyny—from broader male supremacist discourse to men’s rights activism (MRA) and “involuntary celibates” (incels). “The ‘Manosphere,’” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, n.d.
[h] Garcia also had a personal Facebook account and YouTube profile; however, these were taken down before the authors could analyze them.
[i] In this context, “red pill” is a pop cultural reference to the film The Matrix, where the main character is offered the choice of taking a red pill to remain aware of reality, or a blue pill to go back to a simulated world. The idea is that by taking the red pill, one can break free of false consciousness. In the case of the “red pill” cultures online (including the manosphere and the extreme far-right), this predominantly refers to a belief that society is structured to hurt men and white people.
[3] Megan Baynes, “America’s 10 most deadly mass shootings of 2023,” Sky News, May 7, 2023.
[4] Images posted online to the gunman’s social media account.
[6] Images posted online to the gunman’s social media account.
[7] Aya Elamroussi, Artemis Moshtaghian, and Rob Frehse, “Buffalo suspect’s posts about attack plans could be seen online 30 minutes before mass shooting,” CNN, May 18, 2022. For more on the attack, see Amarnath Amarasingam, Marc-Andre Argentino, and Graham Macklin, “The Buffalo Attack: The Cumulative Momentum of Far-Right Terror,” CTC Sentinel 15:7 (2022).
[9] Chris Dehghanpoor, “The lead singer of the band Trapt (yep) recently went on a …,” Twitter, May 16, 2023.
[11] Holly Patrick, “Texas mall shooting: Dashcam captures moment gunman opens fire,” Independent, May 7, 2023.
[12] Allen Police Department, “At 3:36 p.m. on Saturday, May 6, 2023, an Allen Police Department officer on an unrelated call …,” Twitter, May 7, 2023.
[14] Zadrozny, Kube, Dilanian, and Ortiz.
[15] Images posted online to the gunman’s social media account.
[17] “Updated Monday, May 8 at 5:14PM,” Allen Police Department; Alex Sundby, “Texas Mall shooting victims include 2 young sisters, a 3-year-old boy and his parents,” CBS News, May 9, 2023.
[19] “Quick Facts: Allen city, Texas,” United States Census Bureau, July 1, 2022.
[22] Luke Barr, “Texas mall shooting suspect’s alleged extremism part of growing trend in US: DHS bulletin,” ABC News, May 24, 2023.
[23] Karl, “Social Media in Russia,” Dreamgrow, January 7, 2023.
[25] American History X, IMDb, n.d.
[26] Amarasingam, Argentino, and Macklin.
[27] Emily K. Carian, Alex DiBranco, and Chelsea Ebin eds., Male Supremacism in The United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynistic Incels and the Alt-Right (Abingdon, Routledge, 2022).
[28] See Kathleen M. Blee, “Becoming a racist: Women in contemporary Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups,” Gender & Society 10:6 (1996): pp. 680-702; Elizabeth Pearson, “Extremism and toxic masculinity: The man question re-posed,” International Affairs 95:6 (2019): pp. 1,251-1,270; Alice E. Marwick and Robyn Caplan, “Drinking male tears: Language, the manosphere, and networked harassment,” Feminist Media Studies 18:4 (2018): pp. 543-559; Ashley Mattheis, “Manifesto memes: the radical right’s new dangerous visual rhetorics,” Open Democracy, September 16, 2023; and Ashley Mattheis, “Understanding Digital Hate Culture,” Fair Observer, August 14, 2019.
[31] “Foid,” ADL, n.d.
[32] Shaila Dewan, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” New York Times, March 18, 2021. See also Meili Criezis, “The Allen, Texas Mass Shooting: An Examination of Misogyny, Anti-Asian Racism, and Internalised Racism,” GNET, May 16, 2023.
[33] For discussions of the historical entanglement between whiteness and femininity in U.S. racial representations, see Kathy Deliovsky, “Normative White Femininity: Race, Gender and the Politics of Beauty,” Atlantis 33:1 (2008): pp. 49-59; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press, 1995); and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17:2 (1992): pp. 251-274.
[35] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Madeleine Blackman, “Fluidity of the Fringes: Prior Extremist Involvement as a Radicalization Pathway,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 45:7 (2022): pp. 555-578.
[37] Edwin Rios, “The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right,” Guardian, May 22, 2023.
[40] Daniel Martinez Hosang and Joseph E. Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), p. 104.
