At 9:00 AM Wednesday inside a federal courthouse in Texas, the sentencing hearing for 24-year old white nationalist Patrick Crusius began, as CNN reported. Crusius in February pleaded guilty to 90 federal charges, half of them reportedly hate crime charges for his 2019 mass shooting slaughter of 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, which he said he chose specifically because it would have a large number of Hispanics.
NPR‘s Vanessa Romo reported in 2020 that the El Paso Walmart “is a popular destination among Mexican tourists who cross into the U.S. from the neighboring city of Juarez.” Crusius drove 600 miles in 11 hours to reach that particular Walmart, to carry out his intended mass murder.
“Shortly before the shooting started, Crusius is believed to have posted a ‘racist, anti-immigrant screed to a website popular within white supremacy circles,'” Romo also reported.
“In it, the author ranted against interracial mixing and the ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas,'” NPR added.
“They are the instigators, not me,” Crusius reportedly stated in his manifesto. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
Announcing his guilty plea in February, the U.S. Dept. of Justice confirmed that Crusius “admitted he wrote a manifesto,” in which “he characterized himself as a white nationalist, motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States. Crusius admitted to selecting El Paso, a border city, as his target to dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States.”
Last week Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis was highly-criticized after launching his latest attack on immigrants, an attack some have noticed uses the same rhetoric as white nationalist Patrick Crusius.
Zachary Mueller, who tracks strategic racism in his role as political director for America’s Voice, a pro-immigration advocacy group, noted on Wednesday Crusius’s sentencing hearing and that Governor DeSantis too has been using the “invasion” rhetoric.
“He wants to overturn the 14th amendment, indefinitely detain children, and create a mass-deportation regime that would uproot families and destabilize communities across the country. It’s as ugly as it is unworkable,” Mueller told The Guardian in an article published Sunday.
READ MORE: Tucker Carlson Attacks Biden With Same Words Found in ‘Manifesto’ of Accused El Paso Mass Shooter
Mueller isn’t the only one to notice.
In his Washington Post opinion column Greg Sargent wrote last week, “DeSantis’s ugly descent into ‘invasion’ hysteria can’t go unanswered.”
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a plan for the southern border this week that uses the word ‘invasion’ at least five times. He later took this rhetoric to hallucinogenic extremes, declaring on Fox News that anyone with drugs who ‘is cutting through a border wall’ should end up ‘stone-cold dead,'” Sargent wrote. “The specter of a migrant ‘invasion,’ which carries white nationalist overtones, has been a mainstay of Donald Trump’s political vocabulary ever since he ran for president in 2016. But the fact that DeSantis and Trump — the leaders in polls for the Republican nomination — are both all in on this ugly notion shows how profoundly it is capturing the GOP.”
On his campaign website, DeSantis has an entire section titled, “Stop the Invasion.” He’s also promoting that tag line on Twitter.
On Twitter, Sargent noted, “The vile ‘invasion’ language about the border has almost entirely taken over the GOP at this point. DeSantis‘s border plan uses this ugly term over and over again. House Republicans say it almost daily. This derangement is out of control.”
“The story here should be that Republicans pushing ‘invasion’ and ‘great replacement’ language are engaged in utterly deranged public conduct,” Sargent warned. “It’s not acceptable to characterize people fleeing humanitarian horrors this way, and Dems should say so.”
See the videos and tweets above or at this link.