Yesterday there was another horrific hate crime perpetrated down in Florida when a racist walked into a Dollar Store and gunned down 3 people because they were Black:
“This shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a news conference early Saturday evening.
Waters said the shooter, who he described as a White man in his 20s, shot and killed himself after the attack. The suspect left behind what the sheriff described as three manifestos outlining his “disgusting ideology of hate” and his motive in the attack.
All three victims, two men and one woman, were Black.
Waters said the shooter lived in Clay County, Florida, south of Jacksonville, with his parents. Jacksonville is located in northeast Florida, about 35 miles south of the Georgia border.
Waters said the shooter told his father by text to “check his computer.” The father found documents described by Waters as manifestos and called authorities.
But Waters said by the time authorities were alerted about the manifestos, the gunman had already started the attack in the Dollar General.
Last week a California shop keeper who flew a pride flag on her storefront was gunned down:
The man who shot and killed the store owner last week over her display of a pride flag outside her store was a far-right conspiracy theorist who shared deeply anti-LGBTQ and antisemitic content on his social media accounts.
Travis Ikeguchi, 27, shot Laura Ann Carleton, 66, on Friday after “yelling many homophobic slurs” about the store’s pride flag, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said at a news conference Monday.
The shooter fled the scene but police officers tracked him down later on Friday. When confronted, police said in a press conference, the 27-year-old fired at multiple patrol vehicles with an unregistered semi-automatic handgun before he was shot in what was described by officials as a “lethal force encounter.”
Authorities said they are continuing to investigate the murder as a possible hate crime. While they believe the shooter acted alone, authorities are continuing to look into the possibility that he was affiliated with a hate group.
But a review of 27-year-old’s social media accounts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and the far-right social network Gab, show that the shooter had fully embraced a wide range of conspiracy theories—from claiming the 9/11 attacks were staged to suggestions that former first lady Michelle Obama is a man to denying climate change. He also posted content opposing gun control measures.
The shooter spent much of his time online sharing anti-LGBTQ content, reposting and responding to content shared by right-wing figures like commentator Matt Walsh and fringe networks like One America News. His pinned tweet, posted in June, simply showed a rainbow flag on fire with the caption: “What to do with the LGBTQP [sic] flag.”
On Gab, one of his pinned posts was even more explicitly threatening to the LGBTQ community. “We need to STOP COMPROMISING on this LGBT dictatorship and not let them take over our lives,” he wrote. “Stop accepting this abomination that the government is forcing us to submit to these mentally disordered tyrants.”
Another pinned post on Gab featured a link to a video entitled: “When Should You Shoot a Cop,” along with the caption: “There will come a time that we have to do this.” While the shooter’s X profile remains active, his Gab profile was removed late on Monday. X and Gab did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The majority of the suspect’s posts are infused with an overt Christian nationalism, which quickly gives way to virulent antisemitism in much of the content he shared online.
The shooter only followed 19 people on X, including One American News, former President Donald Trump, and conspiracy theorist David Knight, who once worked with Alex Jones. The shooter also followed and boosted rightwing professor and conspiracy theory promoter Jordan Peterson, antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the right-wing satirical website the Babylon Bee.
Trump has said nothing about any of this, of course. He’s too busy bragging about his golf game. DeSantis took a moment on the campaign trail to call the Florida shooter a scumbag. Ramaswamy said “The reality is we’ve created such a racialized culture in this country in the last few years so that right as the last embers of racism were burning out, we have a culture in this country …. that throws kerosine on that racism.” If only everyone would shut up about racism everything would be fine.
Racism was almost gone until people started talking about it in the last few years. Ok then.