Cool Zone Media.
This program includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis an upcoming book about the eugenics boom in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
I'm Stephen Monicelli, an investigative reporter who covers political extremism in Texas and beyond.
In the Pitch Start. Just before midnight on August third, twenty nineteen, Patrick Crusius took off what would soon be an infamous journey. The young man from the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas had become obsessed with an idea that would soon move him to murder.
That idea had been inspired in part by Renaud Camu, a French racist enraged by the growing Muslim population in Europe. In twenty eleven, Camu had given a new name to what was actually an old idea with the publication of his book Legrand Replacement, which translates in English to the Great Replacement.
Camu argued that global elites had conspired to replace the white, culturally superior population of Europe with darker skinned people who were mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. He claimed these elites had opened the door to mass migration, discouraged white reproduction, and encouraged the newcomers to intermarry with whites. This racial displacement, Camu asserted, had brought crime and terrorism to Europe and threatened the very survival of Western culture.
Camu's idea predated World War Two. The Great Replacement theory hardly differed from key ideas promoted by eugenicists in Western Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twenty century. Eugenicists sought to ensure the survival of those they believed to be biologically superior. Their methods included forced sterilization and harsh immigration restrictions. Failure in this mission,
they believed, would lead to white extinction. But Camu's book enraged and energized a new generation of far right extremists, not just in his native France, but all around the world.
Camu didn't specifically identify the elite spuzzedly responsible for what he called a reverse colonization of the European homeland, but leaders of the international far right quickly filled in the blanks.
The Great Replacement, conspiracy, theorists insisted had been engineered by Jews who desired to destroy the Arians who served as their only competitors for global control, and the chaos that would unfold as europe racially darkened Jewish people would spuzzily complete their conquests of the world's politics and finances, and would enslave a now intellectually backward global workforce.
Camu's racist fever dream ricochet around the world and left behind it a trail of blood. The dread of the Great Replacement animated a coalition of neo Nazis and other white supremacists who swarmed to Charlottesville, Virginia, on the night of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, for a quote Unite the Right rally protesting the proposed removal of a statue honoring
Confederate General Robert Elie. Carrying tiki torches, with many wearing matching polo shirts and khakis, the extremists paraded on the grounds of the University of Virginia campus, chanting white lives Matter and a phrase directly inspired by Camu's now six year old polemic.
Why not, Why not Jews?
Why Not?
Jews? The next day, one of the racist marchers murdered an anti racism activist, Heather haer Wig ramdat car into a crowd of counter protesters the following year, in twenty eighteen, of forty six you're old white nationalist who feared a hypothetical Jewish and Muslim plot to take over America entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and, using a long rifle and three semi automatic pistols, sprayed
the congregation with bullets over a period of twenty minutes, murdering eleven and wounding six. The synagogue had participated in a program to aid migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, charity work that prompted the murderer, Robert Bowers, to post online that such organizations quote like to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.
The Great Replacement Theory and its online promoters claimed a high body count in twenty nineteen. On March fifteenth, a twenty eight year old Australian man, Brendan Terrant, live streamed his slaughter of fifty one Muslims and the wounding of eighty nine others at Tu Mosque'es in christ Church, New Zealand. Parant authored a seventy four page manifesto which he emailed to newspapers and television stations, as well as New Zealand's
Prime Minister. He repeatedly referred to the Great Replacement theory and expressed admiration for Anders Brevick, a Norwegian neo Nazi terrorist who had killed seventy seven people in twenty eleven because of his hatred for Muslims who have settled across the European continent. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised American President Donald Trump as a quote symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.
The murders inspired by the Great Replacement theory were far from over. A mass shooting claimed three lives and wounded three others at a synagogue in Powway, California, in April twenty seven, twenty nineteen, and three others died in seventeen more suffered injuries during an attack at the Gilroy Garlick
Festival in the same state on July twenty eighth. This was the heartbreaking worldwide context in which Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas, took a fatal journey just six stays after the Illroy massacre.
Crusius marked his twenty first birthday just the weekend before the massacre. But for the unemployed young man, it was not a happy occasion. He had grown up watching his father's struggle with chemical dependency. High school classmates described him as withdrawn, and one claimed he had been bullied by
Spanish speaking students. His parents divorced, and he moved to his grandparents' home in a suburb north of Dallas called Allan, a town with a median family income of more than one hundred and twenty one thousand dollars and a history of white flight. Unemployed Crusius spent a lot of hours on eight chan, an online message board favored by white supremacists.
Crusius had given himself a grim mission he believed no one else had the guts to carry out, According to the Dallas Morning News. Late that Friday evening, he loaded his humble twenty twelve Honda Civic with his laptop computer, one thousand rounds Apollo point bullets ear muffs in a semi automatic civilian version of an AK forty seven he had ordered online from Romania. The Texas Tribune later reported that as of twenty nineteen, Romania was exporting nine thousand
AK forty sevens to the United States every year. He also brought heavily insulated gloves because that rifle, he would later complain, quote, overheats massively. After about one hundred shots or fired in quick succession, the college student sought to start a war one he thought he wouldn't survive, but that if others followed his example might save the country.
Head of his ten hour trek westward across the vast Texas landscape, Crusius filled his gas tank and pumped himself with energy drinks. He arrived in El Paso at about eight am, first parking at a CSE's Pizza, which happened to be closed. He then cruised around the border city of almost seven hundred thousand people, where sixty three percent
of the population primarily speaks Spanish at home. He eventually stopped at the parking lot of a Walmart superstore nicknamed the Juarez Walmart because of the large number of customers who shopped there from across the Mexican border. About three thousand people in all reestimated to be at the retail outlet when Crusius arrived.
Crusius walked inside and cased the joint for at least half an hour. He went back to his civic and sat for a while in contemplation. Hungry, he went back into the store, bought an orange, and then, after returning to his car a second time, gobbled it. He then posted online a two three hundred and eighty eight word racist screed called The Inconvenient Truth. At about ten thirty eight, Crusius stepped out of his car, weapon in hand, and
began massacring Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He described in his manifesto as quote the Invaders.
This is an NBC News special report, and here's Jose dis Bollard.
Good afternoon, and update now on that deadly shooting here a busy shopping in El Paso, Texas. It happened at a walmart near Colo Vista Mall this morning about ten am local time. The scene is about seven miles from downtown l Paso.
In about three minutes, Crusius slaughtered twenty three and wounded twenty two others, in spite of expressing a wish that he would die in the attack, Crusius surrendered. Police quickly connected Crusius to his Internet dietribe, which he opened by saying he quote supports the christ Church shooter and his manifesto, referring to Brenton Terran. Crusius then pivoted to outrage over
Mexican immigration in the United States. Jason Whiteley of a WFAA in Dallas reported on the manifesto's disturbing content.
In the letter, the shooter describes himself as a white nationalist, a right wing extremist consumed by conspiracy theories. In short, he thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants in this country. The letter states this attack is in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, he wrote, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
By the time of the El Paso massacre, eighty men, women, and children had been murdered by extremists inspired by the great Replacement theory in twenty nineteen alone. The carnage didn't end at al Paso. On May fourteenth, twenty twenty two, a white suspect wrote a hateful rant he posted online before murdering ten and wounding three African Americans in a Buffalo, New York supermarket. He linked declining white birth rates to genocide.
On May sixth, twenty twenty three, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, a Latino white supremacist who embraced neo Nazi ideology, drove from his Dallas apartment to an outlet mall in Crusius's hometown of Allen. Tattooed with a Swaska, Garcia shot to death nine people, including a three year old, and wounded seven others before being killed by a police officer. Garcia seemed to be targeting Asians and Asian Americans Throughout this mayhem.
The political right has proven eager to blame everything but the wide open gun laws in places like Texas, which made it legal for Crusius to mail order a civilian style AK forty seven. There was no interrogation of the long history of racism or of repeated Republican rhetoric depicting
immigrants as dangerous, but there were other convenient excuses. In an interview on the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends shortly after the Opasser tragedy, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick offered a menu of alternative explanations for the mass shooting, such as video games. He also suggested that public schools needed a healthy infusion of theocracy and reverence for the stars and stripes.
Where are we as a country. I look at social media, that the violence of just bullying people on social media every day, and we turn our head and we allow it. I look at on a Sunday morning when most of your viewers right now, half of the country are getting ready to go to church, and yet tomorrow we won't let our kids even pray in our schools. We have
to look at ourselves as a nation. That's many factors that go into the shooting, many factors, and it's not a time to politicize at the time to look deep inside of who we are as a country where we no longer salute our flag or we throw water on law enforcement and thank god we have law enforcement.
In recent years, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has described immigration at the southern border as an invasion that is part of a democratic plan to quote take over our country without firing a shot. In response to this alleged plan, Patrick has said that Texas has a right to defend itself from the threat of criminal invaders in a Fox News interview in twenty twenty four.
For all those people who should come here legally processed and vetted. In that group are hundreds of thousands, thousands and thousands of criminals, murderers, molesters, gang members, drug dealers, carjackers, kidnappers, you name it, they're part of this group and terrorist.
Patrick Crusius's panic about white genocide and the violent rise of black and brown people against Western civilization had deep roots in American culture. The Texas history of segregation, white flight post September eleventh, Islamophobia, and the backlash to globalization poison Crusius' particular worldview. But perhaps the biggest factor in Crusius's murderous rampage was that he was taught to hate and fear immigrants by the grown ups around him in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
But before we get into that, a quick eye break.
The fear of white distinction at the hands of so called savages dates back to Puritan New England in the sixteen hundreds, even as they lethally infected tens of thousands of native peoples with bubonic plague malaria measles, smallplox, and typhus. English colonizers slew thousands more in wars of conquests that did not spare the very old, infants, that disabled, or
the unarmed. Puritans didn't just kill Native Americans. They often tortured them first and desecrated their bodies with rituals of humiliation, such as scalping. With each act of genocide, however, the Puritans projected those war crimes on their victims. One Puritan leader, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, warned that whites were in quote continual danger of the savage people.
A white habit of mind formed that relieved any guilt the inhabitants of colonial America might feel about their bloodthirsty conquests. The invaders became the defenders of the homeland, the outarmed became the menace, and the vanquished became the progressors. In fact, genocide became an act of self defense.
In the Lone Star state public school students are required to study Texas history, Crusius would have been fed highly distorted accounts of the Texas Revolution of eighteen thirty five to eighteen thirty six. Although the content has improved since
the Civil Rights movement. For the most part, Texas history textbooks have depicted Mexican soldiers as ruthless killers who, without qualms, shot Anglo soldiers at the Battle of Goliad in Southeast Texas and the survivors at the Alamo after they surrendered.
These same students were not typically taught that white Texans massacred six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers, most of whom had already cast away their weapons after the Battle of San Jacinto the engagement that ended the Texas Revolutionary War.
Until the late twentieth century, Texas students were also taught that after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisemen of African Americans, dangerous chaos reigned. A sort of racist myth was promoted in textbooks and classroom lectures that Reconstruction, the state's first brief, failed experiment in multiracial democracy,
was actually a tragedy. According to the legend promoted in schoolhouses, Reconstruction was defined not by increased literacy, improved infrastructure, in the expansion of black human rights, but instead by political corruption, wild government overspending, high taxes, out of control crime, and endemic incompetence. During reconstruction, children were taught the United States armed African American soldiers, who then harassed and assaulted harmless whites,
especially women. In short, across the curriculum, white students learned that whenever black and brown people gained power politically, socially, or economically, white people have been in mortal peril, a lesson that implies the need to kill or be killed.
In the nineteen twenty nineteen thirties, white American school kids across the country were indoctrinated into accepting eugenics. In their biology classes. They learned that if they didn't produce large enough families, whites would lose a demographic race to Jews, Italians, Russians,
and other immigrants pouring into the country. A best selling American author in the nineteen twenties, Lothrop Stoddard, warned his readers that unless trends were reversed, racially, superior Nordics, as he called those from western northern Europe, might have to fight a war of extermination to stem a deadly tide of color. That when Gulf white people worldwide.
El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius grew up in Colin County, which borders Dallas County on the north. The county's wealth before the Civil War derived primarily from cotton cultivated by enslaved labor. During reconstruction, klansmen organized in the county seat of McKinney to terrorize African Americans into not voting. African Americans continued to toil as farm labor after he RECNSCIS destruction, and the white population kept them under tight control through
occasional outbursts of homicidal violence. In the summer of eighteen ninety eight, local whites panicked when between thirty to forty African Americans from out of town routinely gathered during a rainy season in hopes to be on hand when the weather cleared up so they could resume working. Ominous notices began to appear around the town that said quote, mister Negro,
don't let the sun go down on you. On June fifteenth of that year, klansmen warned black residents that they had no more than ten days to leave the area. One family, the Sebrons, became the target of a violent mob of vigilantes known as white cappers, who arrived at their home in the middle of the night to punish them for not vacating their home on Main Street. Anticipating the arrival of the terrorists, Jake Sebrin stood by the
door of his home holding a Winchester rifle. When his assailants realized he had a gun, they fired into the house. Jake then attempted to shoot back, but he was unable to stop the assailants from fatally shooting his pregnant wife, Laura. The three Cebrian children were found screaming and clinging to bed sheets near their mother's bloody body inside their home.
When it was all said and done, White Capper violence continued for years across the state, targeting both African Americans and Mexican Americans in an effort to maintain white supremacy.
Thirteen years later, on August eleventh, nineteen eleven, Colin County authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for allegedly flirting with a white telephone operator. A mob of three hundred outraged white sized Jones from police custody, carried him to the city square and hanged him from a poll in front of the telephone office. In spite of this, bloody history, Colin County got rich, and by the nineteen seventies transformed
into a major urban center. This development correlated with white flight, as Dallas glacially succumbed to court order desegregation beginning in the nineteen sixties, and after uprising and response to a Dallas police saw officer forcing a twelve year old Latino Santos Rodriguez to play a fatal game of Russian Roulette in the backseat of a police squad car.
White flight fueled population explosion in Colin County, governed by conservatives who kept property taxes low compared to those in the metropolitan center to the south. Corporations followed this population shift during the half century between the nineteen seventies and the twenty twenties. Doctor Pepper, Friedo Lay, J. C. Penny, Curing, Pizza Hut, and the Professional Golfers Association of America, as
well as Toyota, planted their corporate headquarters there. However, even if whites moved to Colin County in the nineteen seventies to avoid school integration and feared urban unrest, the new corporations brought with them diverse work forces that include Muslims, Hindus, and people of color from all around the world. In two thousand, non Hispanic whites made up slightly more than
eighty one percent of the Colon County population. In twenty twenty, that number was slightly less than fifty Asian Americans and Asian immigrants made up almost seven percent of the population, while Mexican Americans and immigrants from south of the Rio Grand represented more than ten percent. All the ingredients needed were present for a vicious racial backlash.
By twenty thirteen, the right wing in the entire Dallas Fort Worth area was in full panic mode about immigration. In twenty nineteen, Texas was believed to have the largest Muslim population of any state, numbering about four hundred and twenty two thousand, still less than two percent of the total state population, but one of the fastest growing religious demographics in the area. Two thirds of that population lives
in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Muslim worshippers pray it as many as fifty five mosque in the Dallas Fort Worth area, and the Muslim population in north central Texas is believed to have tripled since twenty ten.
In twenty thirteen, Harry Lerosieir won election as mayor in the Collin County city of Plano. Conservatives mocked him at the time as the quote mayor from Haiti, in reference to his birthplace. When affordable multi family housing was proposed for the suburb of Plano, fear quickly spread that black and brown, low income workers would fill those residences. Signs appeared that said quote, don't Dallas my Plano, referring to the largely black and brown population in the metropolitan center.
Republican politicians across the Dallas Fort Worth area began to warn that some of the newcomers plotted to impose quote Sharia, or Muslim law. The panic stemmed from the practice of many American mosques offering non binding mediation services, employing principles from the Qur'an to couples in troubled marriages to resolve
bitter business disputes between Muslims and so on. Such arbitration is not legally binding, and Muslim practices can't be imposed on non Muslims because of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which forbids the government from establishing any sort of religion. Nevertheless, one Plaino State Representative Jeff Leach in twenty fifteen introduced an anti sharia law in the Texas legislature. His bill failed, but Governor Abbott later signed a similar law in twenty seventeen.
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Dread about Muslims and Sharia law dominated politics in Irving, a suburb with a population of about a quarter million people twelve miles northwest of Dallas for much of twenty fifteen. In February, then Mayor Beth Van Dyne, who later became a Trump appointee, characterized a Muslim mediation panel reportedly located in the Islamic center of Irving as an Islamic court. She introduced a resolution to the Irving City Council supporting
Leech's proposed legislation. It passed five to four, is reported by a CBS affiliate in Dallas.
Irving Mayor Beth Van Dyne has accused local Muslim leaders in the past of creating their own laws called Sharia law, and adjudicating that doctrine bypassing the state and federal court system. Catholic and Jewish faiths also have similar tribunals that are presided over by faith leaders who act as arbitrators, but the locally mom here in Irving says Islam is being targeted yet not breaking any law.
They believe that we are trying to supersede the all state laws, and that's not the case. We work within the boundaries of federal and state law.
Anti Muslim tensions spread across the Dallas Fort Worth area, ending in tragic violence. Anti Muslim extremists held a deliberately provocative quote draw the profit art contest in Garland, Texas, a city of about two hundred and thirty five thousand just north of Dallas, knowing that the images of Ma Shamed are prohibited by Islam and were likely to inflame
the broader Muslim community. Two heavily armed Muslim men took the bait that day, driving from out of state and arriving at the scene of the contest on May third. They then shot a Garland police car before being killed with return fire.
Little more than four months at the Garland shootings, Irving police arrested Achmed Mohammed, a Muslim of Sudanese background, on September fourteenth, twenty fifteen, after the fourteen year old had brought a digital clock built as a personal science project to MacArthur High School. Proud of his creation, Mohammed showed the clock to one of his teachers, who subjected the
boy to racial profiling. Fearing the clock might be a bomb, the teacher seized the device and sent Mohammed to the principal, who then called irving police. Officers interrogated the boy for
ninety minutes while his parents were denied access to their son. Meanwhile, a militia inspired by Irving Mayor Van Dine's alarmist warnings of our Sharia law showed up at two mosque and the Dallas suburbs, wearing camouflage and mask and brandishing twelve gage shotguns as a stock worshipper's going to prayer.
Islamophobia in the Dallas Fort Worth area even extended to deceased Muslims. The Islamic Association of Collin County had hoped to establish a thirty five acre burial plot in Farmersville, a town of about four thousand people. When the Farmersville Planning and Zoning Commission approved the plan in May twenty fifteen without a dissending vote, furious opposition erupted. According to a CNN report.
Farmersville is about twenty five miles away from Garland, Texas, where in May police killed two Muslim gunmen who tried to carry out a deadly attack at a draw the prophet Mohammed event. One resident in Farmersville has even suggested using pigs to scare away the Muslim group.
Peg and dump pig's bud and pig heads on a float.
They won't buy the land.
If I had my way, I would outlaw at Islam in America. Farmersville resident Jack Hawkins declared that planning his zoning commission meeting, quote, I would tear down every mosque that was in this country. That's how I feel about it. A local Baptist minister suggested that the cemetery would lead to the establishment of the Madrasa, a Muslim religious school that could become a training ground for extremists. He was interviewed by CNN.
And I believe I'm a watchman on the wall, Ezekiel thirty three see the incoming danger.
David Meeks is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, which ironically sits next to a cemetery. He says the cemetery could bring radical Islam to Farmersville.
I see the expansion of Islam that's going on all over the world. Now it's come to my hometown.
And you see that danger in a cemetery.
Anytime you see the Islamic folks coming into a neighborhood, I think, in my opinion, I think you can say we could be less safe future than we are right now.
One hundred opponents of the cemetery crowded into a July fourteenth, twenty sixteen, city council meeting in Farmersville, with some residents expressing the fear that Muslim corpses would countaminate the local water supply. Members of the local Muslim community and of
the Farmersville City Council suffered threats of violence. Facing a federal lawsuit, the City of Farmersville finally relented and on September twentieth, twenty eighteen, allowed the Islamic Association to move ahead with purchasing the land needed for their graveyard.
This is the poison air. Patrick Crusius grew up breathing. He didn't kill because of computer games, because they didn't pray at schools he attended because a protest against police violence or the collapse of respect for authority. Crusius wrote that America is rotting, quote from the inside out, because of immigration, and that unless whites took up arms against
dark skinned newcomers, whites could become extinct. In his manifesto, this insisted he embraced the great replacement theory before Donald Trump became president. One can only wonder how many other self appointed racial warriors might be inspired of violence by the twenty twenty four presidential campaign that centered mostly on the purported dangers of what Trump repeatedly called migrant crime, including the eating of neighbors, cats, and dogs in the
spread of deadly diseases. Trump has even repeated the warnings of early twentieth century eugenicists about the biological damage he claims immigrants are bringing bad genes to the United States. He says Trump's incendiary anti immigrant rhetoric has been compiled by the new site Politico.
Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens. I said, if you let them in, it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals. These are stone cold killers. They'll walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat. These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and they won't even think about it the next morning. These people are
roaming our country. They could go into a restaurant, they can do whatever they want, and they will kill you because they are wired that way. These people are animals. Now they'll say, oh, that's a terrible thing for him to say. No, No, these people are animals. It's in their jeans, and we got a lot of bad jeans in our country right now.
That tread a white genocide has been nurtured across centuries of American history and has become one of this country's major exports.
And with politicians like Donald Trump stoking fear about the alleged quote enemy within and promoting mass deportations and the idea of quote remigration, which is a notion with a deeply fascist history, we are almost certain to see the great replacement panic continue to boil under the surface of a society with constantly shifting demographics. Ongoing economic insecurity will feed into this, and the passive acceptance of gun violence as the price for American freedom will certainly feed into
future racist violence. This is Stephen Monticelli.
And This is Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
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