On Saturday morning, a 21-year-old white man allegedly opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in a Walmart just a few miles from the Bridge of the Americas connecting El Paso to its sister city of Juárez. Stalking terrified shoppers in the aisles, the shooter left 22 dead and more than two dozen injured. According to an anti-immigrant screed that police believe he wrote, the shooter carried out the massacre to combat “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—making his act perhaps the deadliest single anti-Latinx attack in American history.
Within hours, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was on Fox News. But Patrick didn’t focus on the safety of Texas’ 4.6 million immigrants and 10.7 million Hispanics; instead, he zeroed in on an upcoming event in El Paso supposedly organized by “antifa.” The next day he was back on Fox, and while he did acknowledge the shooting was likely a hate crime, he spent the bulk of his airtime blaming video games, social media, and the paucity of prayer in public schools.
It’s standard for conservatives, in the wake of mass shootings, to deflect attention to chimerical causes like mental illness. But Patrick—even more than other statewide Republicans in Texas—may have a deeper motive for distraction: his own yearslong record of inciting anti-immigrant hatred.
