This long article about Jack Texeira, the Air Force airman who shared classified material to an online group friends is just chilling. (I have included a gift link for those who don’t have the Washington Post sub. so you can read it.) This guy was far more than just an innocent little Christian boy who liked to chat online. He fits the profile of most mass shooters with white supremacist views. Here’s the opener:
Jack Teixeira, dressed in camouflage fatigues, his finger wrapped around the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle, faced the camera and spoke as though reciting an oath.
“Jews scam, n—–s rape, and I mag dump.”
Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets.
The six-second video, taken at a gun range near Teixeira’s home in Massachusetts, affords a brief but illuminating glimpse into the offline world of the 21-year-old National Guard member, who stands accused of leaking a trove of classified military intelligence on the group-chat platform Discord.
Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews,gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded.
Teixeira’s love of guns, which first drew him to an online community of friends, was intertwined with a deep suspicion of the government that he served as an enlisted member of the Air National Guard. But Teixeira did not consider himself a whistleblower, according to friends.
By the time of his arrest, filings by federal prosecutors show that Teixeira had amassed a small arsenal of rifles, shotguns and pistols, as well as a helmet, gas mask and night-vision goggles, all under the roof of the house where he lived withhis mother and stepfather. The Post obtained and verified two videos taken at their home in Dighton, Mass., where the FBI arrested Teixeira last month.
Filmed from the shooter’s perspective, the first video shows a person identified by a Discord user as Teixeira firing an AR-style weapon into the forest. Another video shows the gunman firing a pistol into the woods behind Teixeira’s home, including two rapid volleys that suggest the weapon may have been modified. It isn’t clear what legal or illegal modifications Teixeira may have made, though devices like binary triggers and typically illegal auto sear accessories can make semiautomatic guns fire quicker than they are designed to shoot. A separate photograph shows an AK-style weapon resting on a table outside the family home next to a helmet with attached night-vision goggles.
For Teixeira, firearms practice seemed to be more than a hobby. “He used the term ‘race war’ quite a few times,” said a close friend who spent time with Teixeira in an online community on Discord, a platform popular with video game players, and had lengthy private phone and video calls with him over the course of several years.
“He did call himself racist, multiple times,” the friend said in an interview. “I would say he was proud of it.”
There is much, much more about his online and offline life, including the involvement of his parents and parents of his friends one of whom tells the Post “When did serving your country and being a Christian become a bad thing?”
He is repeatedly described as an “Orthodox Christian” but I’m not sure exactly what it refers to. And a long portion of the article discusses what these people suggest were “jokes” about killing government agents, blowing up buildings etc. which is apparently just normal discourse among young white men who hang out in these online communities.
The gun obsession, the racist views, the anti-government beliefs — he is young Tim McVeigh. They all are. This kid is an extremely dangerous person who I am convinced was caught before he committed a mass act of violence. Every “red flag” was out there, and it appears that his peers and the adults who knew him pretty much all agree with his sociopathic worldview.
They aren’t alone. Here’s the de-facto leader of the House Republicans weighing in on the leaking charges:
“… and a lot more” does a lot of work here, all of which I’m sure she endorses as well. We know she loves guns, that’s for sure.
Read the whole article if you have time. It’s breathtaking.