On Sunday morning, less than 24 hours after a white gunman killed 20 people and injured two dozen more at an El Paso Walmart, Fox News called on Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to help make sense of the bloodshed. While law enforcement told reporters that the shooting appears to have been a hate-driven act of domestic terrorism, Patrick assured the Fox hosts that a more complex set of factors lie behind the violence.
Patrick acknowledged the hate-filled manifesto the 21-year-old shooter appears to have left behind railing against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” However, according to Patrick, the four-page screed that authorities have linked to the shooter mostly highlights the need to “do something about the video game industry.” While Patrick called the violence “obviously a hate crime, I think, in my view, against immigrants from this young man,” he insisted the larger moral decay of society was really to blame. “Half of the country are getting ready to go to church, and tomorrow we won’t let our kids even pray in our schools,” he told the Fox hosts. “It’s many factors that go into these shootings, many factors, and it’s not a time to politicize, it’s a time to take a deep look inside who we are as a country, where we no longer salute our flag or we throw water on law enforcement.”
It’s no surprise that Texas’ lieutenant governor would search for answers that don’t point toward an animus for immigrants. Patrick has built his political career flirting with the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric that permeates the manifesto authorities have linked to the El Paso shooter. Once the host of a right-wing talk radio show, Patrick has been lamenting “the silent invasion of the border” and comparing immigrants to walking pathogens since the 2006 campaign that ushered him into the Texas Senate. In fact, as Texas Monthly recently noted, Patrick has made it a point to go on Fox a lot recently, spreading fear about the border and Democrats’ plans to destroy America through illegal immigration.
