The details of the mass shooting near Houston, Texas on Friday are harrowing. The suspect entered the home with an AR-15, allegedly intoxicated, intent on gunning down an entire family in revenge for them asking him to be quieter late at night. Two of the five dead were women who were found laying on top of living children, having died to shield them from harm. One of the dead was a child. The natural, human response is abject horror and sympathy for these innocent victims, who were just trying to live their lives and raise their children in peace.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, however, has erased his own humanity in his ongoing bid to be a prominent leader in MAGA America. So he responded to the shooting by demonizing the victims, calling them "illegal immigrants" in his tweet about the crime. This bit of casual cruelty came packaged with an expensive fig leaf: A $50,000 reward to anyone who shares information leading to the suspect's capture. No doubt Abbott hoped propping that cash up would deflect attention from his racist pandering.
So far, thankfully, it's not working.
Abbott's ugly words are being contrasted in the press with the reaction of San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers, who choked up as he told reporters, "My heart is with this 8-year-old little boy. I don't care if he was here legally. I don't care if he was here illegally. He was in my county. Five people died in my county, and that is where my heart is—in my county, protecting my people to the best of our ability." An activist shared the permanent residence card of one of the victims, proving that "illegal immigrant" is just a racial slur that has no relationship to the actual immigration status of people who get tagged with it.
I just spoke to the husband of one of the victims. He confirmed to me that his wife was a permanent resident of the US. He even sent me a picture of her ID confirming this.
— Carlos Eduardo Espina (@cespina1998) May 1, 2023
But I guess to Greg Abbott, anyone who is from another country is an ‘ilegal immigrant’. Shameful. https://t.co/O2AphCodlh pic.twitter.com/YjGLdBMtRl
In response to the outcry, Abbott's office claimed he "regrets" the word choice. It was enough to score headlines claiming he "walks back" the statement, but actually reading the statement shows he did no such thing. Instead, his office said they "regret if the information was incorrect." There was no apologizing for the clear racist intent of describing the victims as "illegal immigrants," instead, say, "people," or, if he was looking for specificity, "two men, two women and one child."
For decades, the two most reliable emotions Republicans can tap into in order to motivate their base are racism and fear.
Shocking but not surprising: It's the phrase that's become a cliché when describing Republican behavior in the Donald Trump era. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post noted, Abbott's cruelty-based approach to immigration has become "a centerpiece of his political efforts." One of his favorite stunts is shipping people like they're cargo around the country, so he can be seen dumping immigrants like they are human trash. So implicitly blaming the victims and minimizing their deaths with racist language is sadly par for the course.
Abbott's response also tells us a lot about why most Republican leaders refuse to do anything to keep guns out of the hands of unhinged people, even as most Americans support better regulations on guns. The grim reality is Republicans believe they benefit politically from mass shootings.
For decades, the two most reliable emotions Republicans can tap into in order to motivate their base are racism and fear. A country overrun with guns allows them to dial up the fear to the maximum. Watch Fox News any given night or listen to Trump's speeches. It's all about how America is supposedly a crime-ridden apocalyptic wasteland, and how only authoritarian leaders can save us from all the violence. Having a steady drumbeat of murder stories helps prop this narrative up.
But, of course, tied into that narrative is blatant racism. That's why Abbott labeled these victims "illegal immigrants." He's selling a story where it's not the guns that are the problem, but that some dark-skinned foreigners are somehow bringing the violence to this country. Dehumanizing the victims also helps convince white conservatives that they don't have to care about these deaths. That the problem isn't that a clearly disturbed person had access to a gun that can take out a whole family in the space of a few seconds. No, they can tell themselves that the real problem is racial diversity.
Tucker Carlson may be fired from Fox News, but there's no undoing what is likely his biggest, most evil accomplishment: Mainstreaming the "great replacement" conspiracy theory that was drawn directly from neo-Nazis and other white nationalist scum online. In neo-Nazi circles, the claim is that a Jewish cabal is conspiring to "replace" white Christian Americans with people of color, through a combination of immigration and manipulating white women into having fewer children. Carlson replaced the word "Jews" with euphemisms like "elites" and "globalists," but otherwise, the conspiracy theory was transmitted intact. Even during his last major interview, with Telsa CEO/right-wing troll Elon Musk, they were alluding to the conspiracy theory by claiming "civilization's going to crumble" because of birth control.
He's selling a story where it's not the guns that are the problem, but some dark-skinned foreigners.
Carlson was pushing on an open door, but still, his campaign to mainstream this neo-Nazi idea in the GOP was a resounding success. Polling from the Southern Poverty Law Center last year showed 68% of Republican voters believe increasing racial diversity is "not a natural change but has been motivated by progressive and liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters."
Republican voters have been trained to see people of color not as fellow human beings, but as an existential threat to themselves. That mentality, as history tells us, leads straight to genocidal thinking. Stories like this, where victims of a mass shooting are predominantly people of color, function on two levels for the Republican base. It stokes fear of chaos, justifying their desire for fascistic leadership. But it also satisfies their cruel desire to inflict pain on immigrants, or see them erased entirely. Why on earth would Republicans pass policies that save the lives of people they hate?
This line of thinking is always pulsing beneath the Republican discourse on guns, living in the subtext of their reactions to any murder story where the victims aren't white. Sometimes, however, the subtext becomes the text, such as when the 2022 GOP nominee for Arizona's senate seat, Blake Masters, said the reason we have a gun violence problem is "Black people, frankly." Abbott layered a little more plausible deniability into his tweet, but he was pointing in the same direction: Using this horrible crime to imply a whiter country would be a less violent one.
In truth, the research shows that the best predictor of gun deaths in an area is whether Republicans run it. As Colin Woodard of the Nationhood Lab explained in Politico, racism contributes directly, as well. For two centuries, gun violence was used first to enforce slavery and then segregation. The result is cultures that have a lot more gun violence overall. I'd argue that they also are the ones that resort to victim-blaming people of color for it, as well, which is just about creating an excuse to perpetuate these toxic norms.
The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent. pic.twitter.com/3ZIrKm4MOV
— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) April 24, 2023
Abbott's reaction to this crime is more of the same: Using it to prop up racist fears, while also engaging in victim-blaming that helps white conservatives avoid talking about real solutions that could actually work. Because, ultimately, they don't want real solutions. Republicans want to keep their voters trapped in an incoherent but vivid emotional state of fear and racial loathing, all of which works to shut down rational faculties so that they keep voting Republican. And clearly, GOP leaders don't care how many innocent people are killed in the process.
