Nine Themes in El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto the Media Ignored to Blame Trump

In recent days, major news media outlets and prominent Democratic Party politicians have wildly sought to connect President Trump’s rhetoric and policies to an unhinged manifesto attributed to the 21-year-old accused of murdering 22 people in cold blood and injuring dozens when he opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso.

The manifesto is clearly the work of a demented mind expressing views that are all over the map, yet it has been cited numerous times to divine the El Paso shooter’s alleged motives and link the mass murder to Trump. The New York Times, for example, printed a story titled, “El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language.” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) went so far as to exclaim, “The manifesto that that guy wrote could have been written by the people that write Trump’s speeches.”

A closer look at the manifesto attributed to shooting suspect Patrick Wood Crusius shows that the author did not have a coherent political viewpoint. While the text contains racist language targeting the Hispanic community, it also evidences hatred toward what the writer labeled “average Americans” and calls for a decrease in the general American population. Missing from much of the news media coverage is that the manifesto promotes far-left policy prescriptions including universal healthcare and a socialist-style “universal income.”

While the news media have sought to portray the shooter as a Trump ideologue, perhaps the two main themes of the document are actually anti-corporatist and eco-extremist sentiment. The media coverage also largely ignores that the shooter actually blames the Trump administration for a spike in work visas and repeatedly labeled both Republicans and Democrats as sellouts to corporations on a host of issues.

Here are nine key sections of the manifesto that the news media are largely ignoring in a clear effort to link Trump to the shooter’s warped ideology.