November 19, 2024 • 31 mins
Around the world, racist influencers have instigated a panic over shadowy global elites who have supposedly conspired to flood white-majority countries with immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia in order to destroy Western civilization. This idea, called the Great Replacement Theory, has inspired mass shootings from New Zealand to Buffalo, NY.
This episode outlines the history of the Great Replacement Theory and explores the toxic political and social atmosphere that led to the murder of 23 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and the wounding of 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso, TX on August 3, 2019.
Sources:
Richard Wolin, "'The Leprosy of the Soul in Our Time': On The European Origins of the 'Great Replacement Theory," Los Angeles Review of Books, August 4, 2022, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-leprosy-of-the-soul-in-our-time-on-the-european-origins-of-the-great-replacement-theory/
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), https://www.amazon.com/Gunfighter-Nation-Frontier-Twentieth-Century-America/dp/0806130318
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This program includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis an upcoming
book about the eugenics boom in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm Stephen Monicelli, an investigative reporter who covers political extremism
in Texas and beyond.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
In the Pitch Start. Just before midnight on August third,
twenty nineteen, Patrick Crusius took off what would soon be
an infamous journey. The young man from the Dallas suburb
of Allen, Texas had become obsessed with an idea that
would soon move him to murder.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That idea had been inspired in part by Renaud Camu,
a French racist enraged by the growing Muslim population in Europe.
In twenty eleven, Camu had given a new name to
what was actually an old idea with the publication of
his book Legrand Replacement, which translates in English to the
Great Replacement.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Camu argued that global elites had conspired to replace the white,
culturally superior population of Europe with darker skinned people who
were mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. He
claimed these elites had opened the door to mass migration,
discouraged white reproduction, and encouraged the newcomers to intermarry with whites.
(01:30):
This racial displacement, Camu asserted, had brought crime and terrorism
to Europe and threatened the very survival of Western culture.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Camu's idea predated World War Two. The Great Replacement theory
hardly differed from key ideas promoted by eugenicists in Western
Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century
and early twenty century. Eugenicists sought to ensure the survival
of those they believed to be biologically superior. Their methods
included forced sterilization and harsh immigration restrictions. Failure in this mission,
(02:04):
they believed, would lead to white extinction. But Camu's book
enraged and energized a new generation of far right extremists,
not just in his native France, but all around the world.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Camu didn't specifically identify the elite spuzzedly responsible for what
he called a reverse colonization of the European homeland, but
leaders of the international far right quickly filled in the blanks.
The Great Replacement, conspiracy, theorists insisted had been engineered by
Jews who desired to destroy the Arians who served as
(02:38):
their only competitors for global control, and the chaos that
would unfold as europe racially darkened Jewish people would spuzzily
complete their conquests of the world's politics and finances, and
would enslave a now intellectually backward global workforce.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Camu's racist fever dream ricochet around the world and left
behind it a trail of blood. The dread of the
Great Replacement animated a coalition of neo Nazis and other
white supremacists who swarmed to Charlottesville, Virginia, on the night
of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, for a quote Unite the
Right rally protesting the proposed removal of a statue honoring
(03:18):
Confederate General Robert Elie. Carrying tiki torches, with many wearing
matching polo shirts and khakis, the extremists paraded on the
grounds of the University of Virginia campus, chanting white lives
Matter and a phrase directly inspired by Camu's now six
year old polemic.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Why not, Why not Jews?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Why Not?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Jews? The next day, one of the racist marchers murdered
an anti racism activist, Heather haer Wig ramdat car into
a crowd of counter protesters the following year, in twenty eighteen,
of forty six you're old white nationalist who feared a
hypothetical Jewish and Muslim plot to take over America entered
(04:07):
the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and,
using a long rifle and three semi automatic pistols, sprayed
the congregation with bullets over a period of twenty minutes,
murdering eleven and wounding six. The synagogue had participated in a
program to aid migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America,
(04:28):
charity work that prompted the murderer, Robert Bowers, to post
online that such organizations quote like to bring in invaders
that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch
my people get slaughtered.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
The Great Replacement Theory and its online promoters claimed a
high body count in twenty nineteen. On March fifteenth, a
twenty eight year old Australian man, Brendan Terrant, live streamed
his slaughter of fifty one Muslims and the wounding of
eighty nine others at Tu Mosque'es in christ Church, New Zealand.
Parant authored a seventy four page manifesto which he emailed
(05:03):
to newspapers and television stations, as well as New Zealand's
Prime Minister. He repeatedly referred to the Great Replacement theory
and expressed admiration for Anders Brevick, a Norwegian neo Nazi
terrorist who had killed seventy seven people in twenty eleven
because of his hatred for Muslims who have settled across
the European continent. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised American President
(05:25):
Donald Trump as a quote symbol of renewed white identity
and common purpose.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
The murders inspired by the Great Replacement theory were far
from over. A mass shooting claimed three lives and wounded
three others at a synagogue in Powway, California, in April
twenty seven, twenty nineteen, and three others died in seventeen
more suffered injuries during an attack at the Gilroy Garlick
Festival in the same state on July twenty eighth. This
(05:53):
was the heartbreaking worldwide context in which Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas,
took a fatal journey just six stays after the Illroy massacre.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Crusius marked his twenty first birthday just the weekend before
the massacre. But for the unemployed young man, it was
not a happy occasion. He had grown up watching his
father's struggle with chemical dependency. High school classmates described him
as withdrawn, and one claimed he had been bullied by
Spanish speaking students. His parents divorced, and he moved to
his grandparents' home in a suburb north of Dallas called Allan,
(06:26):
a town with a median family income of more than
one hundred and twenty one thousand dollars and a history
of white flight. Unemployed Crusius spent a lot of hours
on eight chan, an online message board favored by white supremacists.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Crusius had given himself a grim mission he believed no
one else had the guts to carry out, According to
the Dallas Morning News. Late that Friday evening, he loaded
his humble twenty twelve Honda Civic with his laptop computer,
one thousand rounds Apollo point bullets ear muffs in a
semi automatic civilian version of an AK forty seven he
(07:04):
had ordered online from Romania. The Texas Tribune later reported
that as of twenty nineteen, Romania was exporting nine thousand
AK forty sevens to the United States every year. He
also brought heavily insulated gloves because that rifle, he would
later complain, quote, overheats massively. After about one hundred shots
(07:26):
or fired in quick succession, the college student sought to
start a war one he thought he wouldn't survive, but
that if others followed his example might save the country.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Head of his ten hour trek westward across the vast
Texas landscape, Crusius filled his gas tank and pumped himself
with energy drinks. He arrived in El Paso at about
eight am, first parking at a CSE's Pizza, which happened
to be closed. He then cruised around the border city
of almost seven hundred thousand people, where sixty three percent
of the population primarily speaks Spanish at home. He eventually
(07:59):
stopped at the parking lot of a Walmart superstore nicknamed
the Juarez Walmart because of the large number of customers
who shopped there from across the Mexican border. About three
thousand people in all reestimated to be at the retail
outlet when Crusius arrived.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Crusius walked inside and cased the joint for at least
half an hour. He went back to his civic and
sat for a while in contemplation. Hungry, he went back
into the store, bought an orange, and then, after returning
to his car a second time, gobbled it. He then
posted online a two three hundred and eighty eight word
(08:35):
racist screed called The Inconvenient Truth. At about ten thirty eight,
Crusius stepped out of his car, weapon in hand, and
began massacring Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He described in his
manifesto as quote the Invaders.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is an NBC News special report, and here's Jose
dis Bollard.
Speaker 6 (08:56):
Good afternoon, and update now on that deadly shooting here
a busy shopping in El Paso, Texas. It happened at
a walmart near Colo Vista Mall this morning about ten
am local time. The scene is about seven miles from
downtown l Paso.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
In about three minutes, Crusius slaughtered twenty three and wounded
twenty two others, in spite of expressing a wish that
he would die in the attack, Crusius surrendered. Police quickly
connected Crusius to his Internet dietribe, which he opened by
saying he quote supports the christ Church shooter and his manifesto,
referring to Brenton Terran. Crusius then pivoted to outrage over
(09:33):
Mexican immigration in the United States. Jason Whiteley of a
WFAA in Dallas reported on the manifesto's disturbing content.
Speaker 7 (09:41):
In the letter, the shooter describes himself as a white nationalist,
a right wing extremist consumed by conspiracy theories. In short,
he thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants
in this country. The letter states this attack is in
response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators,
(10:01):
he wrote, not me. I am simply defending my country
from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
By the time of the El Paso massacre, eighty men, women,
and children had been murdered by extremists inspired by the
great Replacement theory in twenty nineteen alone. The carnage didn't
end at al Paso. On May fourteenth, twenty twenty two,
a white suspect wrote a hateful rant he posted online
(10:29):
before murdering ten and wounding three African Americans in a Buffalo,
New York supermarket. He linked declining white birth rates to genocide.
On May sixth, twenty twenty three, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, a
Latino white supremacist who embraced neo Nazi ideology, drove from
(10:50):
his Dallas apartment to an outlet mall in Crusius's hometown
of Allen. Tattooed with a Swaska, Garcia shot to death
nine people, including a three year old, and wounded seven
others before being killed by a police officer. Garcia seemed
to be targeting Asians and Asian Americans Throughout this mayhem.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
The political right has proven eager to blame everything but
the wide open gun laws in places like Texas, which
made it legal for Crusius to mail order a civilian
style AK forty seven. There was no interrogation of the
long history of racism or of repeated Republican rhetoric depicting
immigrants as dangerous, but there were other convenient excuses. In
(11:32):
an interview on the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends
shortly after the Opasser tragedy, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
offered a menu of alternative explanations for the mass shooting,
such as video games. He also suggested that public schools
needed a healthy infusion of theocracy and reverence for the
stars and stripes.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Where are we as a country. I look at social media,
that the violence of just bullying people on social media
every day, and we turn our head and we allow it.
I look at on a Sunday morning when most of
your viewers right now, half of the country are getting
ready to go to church, and yet tomorrow we won't
let our kids even pray in our schools. We have
(12:14):
to look at ourselves as a nation. That's many factors
that go into the shooting, many factors, and it's not
a time to politicize at the time to look deep
inside of who we are as a country where we
no longer salute our flag or we throw water on
law enforcement and thank god we have law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
In recent years, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has described immigration
at the southern border as an invasion that is part
of a democratic plan to quote take over our country
without firing a shot. In response to this alleged plan,
Patrick has said that Texas has a right to defend
itself from the threat of criminal invaders in a Fox
(12:53):
News interview in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
For all those people who should come here legally processed
and vetted. In that group are hundreds of thousands, thousands
and thousands of criminals, murderers, molesters, gang members, drug dealers, carjackers, kidnappers,
you name it, they're part of this group and terrorist.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Patrick Crusius's panic about white genocide and the violent rise
of black and brown people against Western civilization had deep
roots in American culture. The Texas history of segregation, white
flight post September eleventh, Islamophobia, and the backlash to globalization
poison Crusius' particular worldview. But perhaps the biggest factor in
(13:38):
Crusius's murderous rampage was that he was taught to hate
and fear immigrants by the grown ups around him in
the Dallas Fort Worth area.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
But before we get into that, a quick eye break.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
The fear of white distinction at the hands of so
called savages dates back to Puritan New England in the
sixteen hundreds, even as they lethally infected tens of thousands
of native peoples with bubonic plague malaria measles, smallplox, and typhus.
English colonizers slew thousands more in wars of conquests that
did not spare the very old, infants, that disabled, or
(14:20):
the unarmed. Puritans didn't just kill Native Americans. They often
tortured them first and desecrated their bodies with rituals of humiliation,
such as scalping. With each act of genocide, however, the
Puritans projected those war crimes on their victims. One Puritan leader,
William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, warned that
(14:41):
whites were in quote continual danger of the savage people.
A white habit of mind formed that relieved any guilt
the inhabitants of colonial America might feel about their bloodthirsty conquests.
The invaders became the defenders of the homeland, the outarmed
became the menace, and the vanquished became the progressors. In fact,
(15:02):
genocide became an act of self defense.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
In the Lone Star state public school students are required
to study Texas history, Crusius would have been fed highly
distorted accounts of the Texas Revolution of eighteen thirty five
to eighteen thirty six. Although the content has improved since
the Civil Rights movement. For the most part, Texas history
textbooks have depicted Mexican soldiers as ruthless killers who, without qualms,
(15:30):
shot Anglo soldiers at the Battle of Goliad in Southeast
Texas and the survivors at the Alamo after they surrendered.
These same students were not typically taught that white Texans
massacred six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers, most of whom
had already cast away their weapons after the Battle of
San Jacinto the engagement that ended the Texas Revolutionary War.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Until the late twentieth century, Texas students were also taught
that after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and
the enfranchisemen of African Americans, dangerous chaos reigned. A sort
of racist myth was promoted in textbooks and classroom lectures
that Reconstruction, the state's first brief, failed experiment in multiracial democracy,
(16:14):
was actually a tragedy. According to the legend promoted in schoolhouses,
Reconstruction was defined not by increased literacy, improved infrastructure, in
the expansion of black human rights, but instead by political corruption,
wild government overspending, high taxes, out of control crime, and
endemic incompetence. During reconstruction, children were taught the United States
(16:39):
armed African American soldiers, who then harassed and assaulted harmless whites,
especially women. In short, across the curriculum, white students learned
that whenever black and brown people gained power politically, socially,
or economically, white people have been in mortal peril, a
lesson that implies the need to kill or be killed.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
In the nineteen twenty nineteen thirties, white American school kids
across the country were indoctrinated into accepting eugenics. In their
biology classes. They learned that if they didn't produce large
enough families, whites would lose a demographic race to Jews, Italians, Russians,
and other immigrants pouring into the country. A best selling
(17:19):
American author in the nineteen twenties, Lothrop Stoddard, warned his
readers that unless trends were reversed, racially, superior Nordics, as
he called those from western northern Europe, might have to
fight a war of extermination to stem a deadly tide
of color. That when Gulf white people worldwide.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius grew up in Colin County,
which borders Dallas County on the north. The county's wealth
before the Civil War derived primarily from cotton cultivated by
enslaved labor. During reconstruction, klansmen organized in the county seat
of McKinney to terrorize African Americans into not voting. African
Americans continued to toil as farm labor after he RECNSCIS destruction,
(18:00):
and the white population kept them under tight control through
occasional outbursts of homicidal violence. In the summer of eighteen
ninety eight, local whites panicked when between thirty to forty
African Americans from out of town routinely gathered during a
rainy season in hopes to be on hand when the
weather cleared up so they could resume working. Ominous notices
began to appear around the town that said quote, mister Negro,
(18:24):
don't let the sun go down on you. On June
fifteenth of that year, klansmen warned black residents that they
had no more than ten days to leave the area.
One family, the Sebrons, became the target of a violent
mob of vigilantes known as white cappers, who arrived at
their home in the middle of the night to punish
them for not vacating their home on Main Street. Anticipating
(18:45):
the arrival of the terrorists, Jake Sebrin stood by the
door of his home holding a Winchester rifle. When his
assailants realized he had a gun, they fired into the house.
Jake then attempted to shoot back, but he was unable
to stop the assailants from fatally shooting his pregnant wife, Laura.
The three Cebrian children were found screaming and clinging to
bed sheets near their mother's bloody body inside their home.
(19:07):
When it was all said and done, White Capper violence
continued for years across the state, targeting both African Americans
and Mexican Americans in an effort to maintain white supremacy.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Thirteen years later, on August eleventh, nineteen eleven, Colin County
authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for allegedly flirting
with a white telephone operator. A mob of three hundred
outraged white sized Jones from police custody, carried him to
the city square and hanged him from a poll in
(19:38):
front of the telephone office. In spite of this, bloody history,
Colin County got rich, and by the nineteen seventies transformed
into a major urban center. This development correlated with white flight,
as Dallas glacially succumbed to court order desegregation beginning in
the nineteen sixties, and after uprising and response to a
(19:59):
Dallas police saw officer forcing a twelve year old Latino
Santos Rodriguez to play a fatal game of Russian Roulette
in the backseat of a police squad car.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
White flight fueled population explosion in Colin County, governed by
conservatives who kept property taxes low compared to those in
the metropolitan center to the south. Corporations followed this population
shift during the half century between the nineteen seventies and
the twenty twenties. Doctor Pepper, Friedo Lay, J. C. Penny, Curing,
Pizza Hut, and the Professional Golfers Association of America, as
(20:31):
well as Toyota, planted their corporate headquarters there. However, even
if whites moved to Colin County in the nineteen seventies
to avoid school integration and feared urban unrest, the new
corporations brought with them diverse work forces that include Muslims, Hindus,
and people of color from all around the world. In
two thousand, non Hispanic whites made up slightly more than
(20:53):
eighty one percent of the Colon County population. In twenty twenty,
that number was slightly less than fifty Asian Americans and
Asian immigrants made up almost seven percent of the population,
while Mexican Americans and immigrants from south of the Rio
Grand represented more than ten percent. All the ingredients needed
were present for a vicious racial backlash.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
By twenty thirteen, the right wing in the entire Dallas
Fort Worth area was in full panic mode about immigration.
In twenty nineteen, Texas was believed to have the largest
Muslim population of any state, numbering about four hundred and
twenty two thousand, still less than two percent of the
total state population, but one of the fastest growing religious
(21:38):
demographics in the area. Two thirds of that population lives
in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Muslim
worshippers pray it as many as fifty five mosque in
the Dallas Fort Worth area, and the Muslim population in
north central Texas is believed to have tripled since twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
In twenty thirteen, Harry Lerosieir won election as mayor in
the Collin County city of Plano. Conservatives mocked him at
the time as the quote mayor from Haiti, in reference
to his birthplace. When affordable multi family housing was proposed
for the suburb of Plano, fear quickly spread that black
and brown, low income workers would fill those residences. Signs
(22:19):
appeared that said quote, don't Dallas my Plano, referring to
the largely black and brown population in the metropolitan center.
Republican politicians across the Dallas Fort Worth area began to
warn that some of the newcomers plotted to impose quote Sharia,
or Muslim law. The panic stemmed from the practice of
many American mosques offering non binding mediation services, employing principles
(22:43):
from the Qur'an to couples in troubled marriages to resolve
bitter business disputes between Muslims and so on. Such arbitration
is not legally binding, and Muslim practices can't be imposed
on non Muslims because of the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution, which forbids the government from establishing any
sort of religion. Nevertheless, one Plaino State Representative Jeff Leach
(23:04):
in twenty fifteen introduced an anti sharia law in the
Texas legislature. His bill failed, but Governor Abbott later signed
a similar law in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Dread about Muslims and Sharia law dominated politics in Irving,
a suburb with a population of about a quarter million
people twelve miles northwest of Dallas for much of twenty fifteen.
In February, then Mayor Beth Van Dyne, who later became
a Trump appointee, characterized a Muslim mediation panel reportedly located
(23:49):
in the Islamic center of Irving as an Islamic court.
She introduced a resolution to the Irving City Council supporting
Leech's proposed legislation. It passed five to four, is reported
by a CBS affiliate in Dallas.
Speaker 10 (24:04):
Irving Mayor Beth Van Dyne has accused local Muslim leaders
in the past of creating their own laws called Sharia law,
and adjudicating that doctrine bypassing the state and federal court system.
Catholic and Jewish faiths also have similar tribunals that are
presided over by faith leaders who act as arbitrators, but
(24:25):
the locally mom here in Irving says Islam is being
targeted yet not breaking any law.
Speaker 11 (24:32):
They believe that we are trying to supersede the all
state laws, and that's not the case. We work within
the boundaries of federal and state law.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Anti Muslim tensions spread across the Dallas Fort Worth area,
ending in tragic violence. Anti Muslim extremists held a deliberately
provocative quote draw the profit art contest in Garland, Texas,
a city of about two hundred and thirty five thousand
just north of Dallas, knowing that the images of Ma
Shamed are prohibited by Islam and were likely to inflame
(25:03):
the broader Muslim community. Two heavily armed Muslim men took
the bait that day, driving from out of state and
arriving at the scene of the contest on May third.
They then shot a Garland police car before being killed
with return fire.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Little more than four months at the Garland shootings, Irving
police arrested Achmed Mohammed, a Muslim of Sudanese background, on
September fourteenth, twenty fifteen, after the fourteen year old had
brought a digital clock built as a personal science project
to MacArthur High School. Proud of his creation, Mohammed showed
(25:40):
the clock to one of his teachers, who subjected the
boy to racial profiling. Fearing the clock might be a bomb,
the teacher seized the device and sent Mohammed to the principal,
who then called irving police. Officers interrogated the boy for
ninety minutes while his parents were denied access to their son. Meanwhile,
a militia inspired by Irving Mayor Van Dine's alarmist warnings
(26:04):
of our Sharia law showed up at two mosque and
the Dallas suburbs, wearing camouflage and mask and brandishing twelve
gage shotguns as a stock worshipper's going to prayer.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Islamophobia in the Dallas Fort Worth area even extended to
deceased Muslims. The Islamic Association of Collin County had hoped
to establish a thirty five acre burial plot in Farmersville,
a town of about four thousand people. When the Farmersville
Planning and Zoning Commission approved the plan in May twenty
fifteen without a dissending vote, furious opposition erupted. According to
a CNN report.
Speaker 12 (26:37):
Farmersville is about twenty five miles away from Garland, Texas,
where in May police killed two Muslim gunmen who tried
to carry out a deadly attack at a draw the
prophet Mohammed event. One resident in Farmersville has even suggested
using pigs to scare away the Muslim group.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Peg and dump pig's bud and pig heads on a float.
Speaker 12 (26:58):
They won't buy the land.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
If I had my way, I would outlaw at Islam
in America. Farmersville resident Jack Hawkins declared that planning his
zoning commission meeting, quote, I would tear down every mosque
that was in this country. That's how I feel about it.
A local Baptist minister suggested that the cemetery would lead
to the establishment of the Madrasa, a Muslim religious school
(27:23):
that could become a training ground for extremists. He was
interviewed by CNN.
Speaker 13 (27:28):
And I believe I'm a watchman on the wall, Ezekiel
thirty three see the incoming danger.
Speaker 12 (27:32):
David Meeks is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, which
ironically sits next to a cemetery. He says the cemetery
could bring radical Islam to Farmersville.
Speaker 13 (27:42):
I see the expansion of Islam that's going on all
over the world. Now it's come to my hometown.
Speaker 12 (27:48):
And you see that danger in a cemetery.
Speaker 13 (27:50):
Anytime you see the Islamic folks coming into a neighborhood,
I think, in my opinion, I think you can say
we could be less safe future than we are right now.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
One hundred opponents of the cemetery crowded into a July fourteenth,
twenty sixteen, city council meeting in Farmersville, with some residents
expressing the fear that Muslim corpses would countaminate the local
water supply. Members of the local Muslim community and of
the Farmersville City Council suffered threats of violence. Facing a
federal lawsuit, the City of Farmersville finally relented and on
(28:24):
September twentieth, twenty eighteen, allowed the Islamic Association to move
ahead with purchasing the land needed for their graveyard.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
This is the poison air. Patrick Crusius grew up breathing.
He didn't kill because of computer games, because they didn't
pray at schools he attended because a protest against police
violence or the collapse of respect for authority. Crusius wrote
that America is rotting, quote from the inside out, because
of immigration, and that unless whites took up arms against
(28:54):
dark skinned newcomers, whites could become extinct. In his manifesto,
this insisted he embraced the great replacement theory before Donald
Trump became president. One can only wonder how many other
self appointed racial warriors might be inspired of violence by
the twenty twenty four presidential campaign that centered mostly on
(29:16):
the purported dangers of what Trump repeatedly called migrant crime,
including the eating of neighbors, cats, and dogs in the
spread of deadly diseases. Trump has even repeated the warnings
of early twentieth century eugenicists about the biological damage he
claims immigrants are bringing bad genes to the United States.
(29:36):
He says Trump's incendiary anti immigrant rhetoric has been compiled
by the new site Politico.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating
inundation of illegal aliens. I said, if you let them in,
it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals.
These are stone cold killers. They'll walk into your kitchen,
they'll cut your throat. These are people at the highest
(30:06):
level of killing that cut your throat and they won't
even think about it the next morning. These people are
roaming our country. They could go into a restaurant, they
can do whatever they want, and they will kill you
because they are wired that way. These people are animals.
Now they'll say, oh, that's a terrible thing for him
to say. No, No, these people are animals. It's in
(30:27):
their jeans, and we got a lot of bad jeans
in our country right now.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
That tread a white genocide has been nurtured across centuries
of American history and has become one of this country's
major exports.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
And with politicians like Donald Trump stoking fear about the
alleged quote enemy within and promoting mass deportations and the
idea of quote remigration, which is a notion with a
deeply fascist history, we are almost certain to see the
great replacement panic continue to boil under the surface of
(31:02):
a society with constantly shifting demographics. Ongoing economic insecurity will
feed into this, and the passive acceptance of gun violence
as the price for American freedom will certainly feed into
future racist violence. This is Stephen Monticelli.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And This is Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This program includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis an upcoming
book about the eugenics boom in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm Stephen Monicelli, an investigative reporter who covers political extremism
in Texas and beyond.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
In the Pitch Start. Just before midnight on August third,
twenty nineteen, Patrick Crusius took off what would soon be
an infamous journey. The young man from the Dallas suburb
of Allen, Texas had become obsessed with an idea that
would soon move him to murder.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That idea had been inspired in part by Renaud Camu,
a French racist enraged by the growing Muslim population in Europe.
In twenty eleven, Camu had given a new name to
what was actually an old idea with the publication of
his book Legrand Replacement, which translates in English to the
Great Replacement.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Camu argued that global elites had conspired to replace the white,
culturally superior population of Europe with darker skinned people who
were mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. He
claimed these elites had opened the door to mass migration,
discouraged white reproduction, and encouraged the newcomers to intermarry with whites.
(01:30):
This racial displacement, Camu asserted, had brought crime and terrorism
to Europe and threatened the very survival of Western culture.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Camu's idea predated World War Two. The Great Replacement theory
hardly differed from key ideas promoted by eugenicists in Western
Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century
and early twenty century. Eugenicists sought to ensure the survival
of those they believed to be biologically superior. Their methods
included forced sterilization and harsh immigration restrictions. Failure in this mission,
(02:04):
they believed, would lead to white extinction. But Camu's book
enraged and energized a new generation of far right extremists,
not just in his native France, but all around the world.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Camu didn't specifically identify the elite spuzzedly responsible for what
he called a reverse colonization of the European homeland, but
leaders of the international far right quickly filled in the blanks.
The Great Replacement, conspiracy, theorists insisted had been engineered by
Jews who desired to destroy the Arians who served as
(02:38):
their only competitors for global control, and the chaos that
would unfold as europe racially darkened Jewish people would spuzzily
complete their conquests of the world's politics and finances, and
would enslave a now intellectually backward global workforce.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Camu's racist fever dream ricochet around the world and left
behind it a trail of blood. The dread of the
Great Replacement animated a coalition of neo Nazis and other
white supremacists who swarmed to Charlottesville, Virginia, on the night
of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, for a quote Unite the
Right rally protesting the proposed removal of a statue honoring
(03:18):
Confederate General Robert Elie. Carrying tiki torches, with many wearing
matching polo shirts and khakis, the extremists paraded on the
grounds of the University of Virginia campus, chanting white lives
Matter and a phrase directly inspired by Camu's now six
year old polemic.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Why not, Why not Jews?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Why Not?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Jews? The next day, one of the racist marchers murdered
an anti racism activist, Heather haer Wig ramdat car into
a crowd of counter protesters the following year, in twenty eighteen,
of forty six you're old white nationalist who feared a
hypothetical Jewish and Muslim plot to take over America entered
(04:07):
the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and,
using a long rifle and three semi automatic pistols, sprayed
the congregation with bullets over a period of twenty minutes,
murdering eleven and wounding six. The synagogue had participated in a
program to aid migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America,
(04:28):
charity work that prompted the murderer, Robert Bowers, to post
online that such organizations quote like to bring in invaders
that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch
my people get slaughtered.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
The Great Replacement Theory and its online promoters claimed a
high body count in twenty nineteen. On March fifteenth, a
twenty eight year old Australian man, Brendan Terrant, live streamed
his slaughter of fifty one Muslims and the wounding of
eighty nine others at Tu Mosque'es in christ Church, New Zealand.
Parant authored a seventy four page manifesto which he emailed
(05:03):
to newspapers and television stations, as well as New Zealand's
Prime Minister. He repeatedly referred to the Great Replacement theory
and expressed admiration for Anders Brevick, a Norwegian neo Nazi
terrorist who had killed seventy seven people in twenty eleven
because of his hatred for Muslims who have settled across
the European continent. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised American President
(05:25):
Donald Trump as a quote symbol of renewed white identity
and common purpose.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
The murders inspired by the Great Replacement theory were far
from over. A mass shooting claimed three lives and wounded
three others at a synagogue in Powway, California, in April
twenty seven, twenty nineteen, and three others died in seventeen
more suffered injuries during an attack at the Gilroy Garlick
Festival in the same state on July twenty eighth. This
(05:53):
was the heartbreaking worldwide context in which Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas,
took a fatal journey just six stays after the Illroy massacre.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Crusius marked his twenty first birthday just the weekend before
the massacre. But for the unemployed young man, it was
not a happy occasion. He had grown up watching his
father's struggle with chemical dependency. High school classmates described him
as withdrawn, and one claimed he had been bullied by
Spanish speaking students. His parents divorced, and he moved to
his grandparents' home in a suburb north of Dallas called Allan,
(06:26):
a town with a median family income of more than
one hundred and twenty one thousand dollars and a history
of white flight. Unemployed Crusius spent a lot of hours
on eight chan, an online message board favored by white supremacists.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Crusius had given himself a grim mission he believed no
one else had the guts to carry out, According to
the Dallas Morning News. Late that Friday evening, he loaded
his humble twenty twelve Honda Civic with his laptop computer,
one thousand rounds Apollo point bullets ear muffs in a
semi automatic civilian version of an AK forty seven he
(07:04):
had ordered online from Romania. The Texas Tribune later reported
that as of twenty nineteen, Romania was exporting nine thousand
AK forty sevens to the United States every year. He
also brought heavily insulated gloves because that rifle, he would
later complain, quote, overheats massively. After about one hundred shots
(07:26):
or fired in quick succession, the college student sought to
start a war one he thought he wouldn't survive, but
that if others followed his example might save the country.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Head of his ten hour trek westward across the vast
Texas landscape, Crusius filled his gas tank and pumped himself
with energy drinks. He arrived in El Paso at about
eight am, first parking at a CSE's Pizza, which happened
to be closed. He then cruised around the border city
of almost seven hundred thousand people, where sixty three percent
of the population primarily speaks Spanish at home. He eventually
(07:59):
stopped at the parking lot of a Walmart superstore nicknamed
the Juarez Walmart because of the large number of customers
who shopped there from across the Mexican border. About three
thousand people in all reestimated to be at the retail
outlet when Crusius arrived.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Crusius walked inside and cased the joint for at least
half an hour. He went back to his civic and
sat for a while in contemplation. Hungry, he went back
into the store, bought an orange, and then, after returning
to his car a second time, gobbled it. He then
posted online a two three hundred and eighty eight word
(08:35):
racist screed called The Inconvenient Truth. At about ten thirty eight,
Crusius stepped out of his car, weapon in hand, and
began massacring Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He described in his
manifesto as quote the Invaders.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is an NBC News special report, and here's Jose
dis Bollard.
Speaker 6 (08:56):
Good afternoon, and update now on that deadly shooting here
a busy shopping in El Paso, Texas. It happened at
a walmart near Colo Vista Mall this morning about ten
am local time. The scene is about seven miles from
downtown l Paso.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
In about three minutes, Crusius slaughtered twenty three and wounded
twenty two others, in spite of expressing a wish that
he would die in the attack, Crusius surrendered. Police quickly
connected Crusius to his Internet dietribe, which he opened by
saying he quote supports the christ Church shooter and his manifesto,
referring to Brenton Terran. Crusius then pivoted to outrage over
(09:33):
Mexican immigration in the United States. Jason Whiteley of a
WFAA in Dallas reported on the manifesto's disturbing content.
Speaker 7 (09:41):
In the letter, the shooter describes himself as a white nationalist,
a right wing extremist consumed by conspiracy theories. In short,
he thinks that white people are being replaced by immigrants
in this country. The letter states this attack is in
response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators,
(10:01):
he wrote, not me. I am simply defending my country
from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
By the time of the El Paso massacre, eighty men, women,
and children had been murdered by extremists inspired by the
great Replacement theory in twenty nineteen alone. The carnage didn't
end at al Paso. On May fourteenth, twenty twenty two,
a white suspect wrote a hateful rant he posted online
(10:29):
before murdering ten and wounding three African Americans in a Buffalo,
New York supermarket. He linked declining white birth rates to genocide.
On May sixth, twenty twenty three, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, a
Latino white supremacist who embraced neo Nazi ideology, drove from
(10:50):
his Dallas apartment to an outlet mall in Crusius's hometown
of Allen. Tattooed with a Swaska, Garcia shot to death
nine people, including a three year old, and wounded seven
others before being killed by a police officer. Garcia seemed
to be targeting Asians and Asian Americans Throughout this mayhem.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
The political right has proven eager to blame everything but
the wide open gun laws in places like Texas, which
made it legal for Crusius to mail order a civilian
style AK forty seven. There was no interrogation of the
long history of racism or of repeated Republican rhetoric depicting
immigrants as dangerous, but there were other convenient excuses. In
(11:32):
an interview on the Sunday edition of Fox and Friends
shortly after the Opasser tragedy, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
offered a menu of alternative explanations for the mass shooting,
such as video games. He also suggested that public schools
needed a healthy infusion of theocracy and reverence for the
stars and stripes.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Where are we as a country. I look at social media,
that the violence of just bullying people on social media
every day, and we turn our head and we allow it.
I look at on a Sunday morning when most of
your viewers right now, half of the country are getting
ready to go to church, and yet tomorrow we won't
let our kids even pray in our schools. We have
(12:14):
to look at ourselves as a nation. That's many factors
that go into the shooting, many factors, and it's not
a time to politicize at the time to look deep
inside of who we are as a country where we
no longer salute our flag or we throw water on
law enforcement and thank god we have law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
In recent years, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has described immigration
at the southern border as an invasion that is part
of a democratic plan to quote take over our country
without firing a shot. In response to this alleged plan,
Patrick has said that Texas has a right to defend
itself from the threat of criminal invaders in a Fox
(12:53):
News interview in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
For all those people who should come here legally processed
and vetted. In that group are hundreds of thousands, thousands
and thousands of criminals, murderers, molesters, gang members, drug dealers, carjackers, kidnappers,
you name it, they're part of this group and terrorist.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Patrick Crusius's panic about white genocide and the violent rise
of black and brown people against Western civilization had deep
roots in American culture. The Texas history of segregation, white
flight post September eleventh, Islamophobia, and the backlash to globalization
poison Crusius' particular worldview. But perhaps the biggest factor in
(13:38):
Crusius's murderous rampage was that he was taught to hate
and fear immigrants by the grown ups around him in
the Dallas Fort Worth area.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
But before we get into that, a quick eye break.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
The fear of white distinction at the hands of so
called savages dates back to Puritan New England in the
sixteen hundreds, even as they lethally infected tens of thousands
of native peoples with bubonic plague malaria measles, smallplox, and typhus.
English colonizers slew thousands more in wars of conquests that
did not spare the very old, infants, that disabled, or
(14:20):
the unarmed. Puritans didn't just kill Native Americans. They often
tortured them first and desecrated their bodies with rituals of humiliation,
such as scalping. With each act of genocide, however, the
Puritans projected those war crimes on their victims. One Puritan leader,
William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, warned that
(14:41):
whites were in quote continual danger of the savage people.
A white habit of mind formed that relieved any guilt
the inhabitants of colonial America might feel about their bloodthirsty conquests.
The invaders became the defenders of the homeland, the outarmed
became the menace, and the vanquished became the progressors. In fact,
(15:02):
genocide became an act of self defense.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
In the Lone Star state public school students are required
to study Texas history, Crusius would have been fed highly
distorted accounts of the Texas Revolution of eighteen thirty five
to eighteen thirty six. Although the content has improved since
the Civil Rights movement. For the most part, Texas history
textbooks have depicted Mexican soldiers as ruthless killers who, without qualms,
(15:30):
shot Anglo soldiers at the Battle of Goliad in Southeast
Texas and the survivors at the Alamo after they surrendered.
These same students were not typically taught that white Texans
massacred six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers, most of whom
had already cast away their weapons after the Battle of
San Jacinto the engagement that ended the Texas Revolutionary War.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Until the late twentieth century, Texas students were also taught
that after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and
the enfranchisemen of African Americans, dangerous chaos reigned. A sort
of racist myth was promoted in textbooks and classroom lectures
that Reconstruction, the state's first brief, failed experiment in multiracial democracy,
(16:14):
was actually a tragedy. According to the legend promoted in schoolhouses,
Reconstruction was defined not by increased literacy, improved infrastructure, in
the expansion of black human rights, but instead by political corruption,
wild government overspending, high taxes, out of control crime, and
endemic incompetence. During reconstruction, children were taught the United States
(16:39):
armed African American soldiers, who then harassed and assaulted harmless whites,
especially women. In short, across the curriculum, white students learned
that whenever black and brown people gained power politically, socially,
or economically, white people have been in mortal peril, a
lesson that implies the need to kill or be killed.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
In the nineteen twenty nineteen thirties, white American school kids
across the country were indoctrinated into accepting eugenics. In their
biology classes. They learned that if they didn't produce large
enough families, whites would lose a demographic race to Jews, Italians, Russians,
and other immigrants pouring into the country. A best selling
(17:19):
American author in the nineteen twenties, Lothrop Stoddard, warned his
readers that unless trends were reversed, racially, superior Nordics, as
he called those from western northern Europe, might have to
fight a war of extermination to stem a deadly tide
of color. That when Gulf white people worldwide.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius grew up in Colin County,
which borders Dallas County on the north. The county's wealth
before the Civil War derived primarily from cotton cultivated by
enslaved labor. During reconstruction, klansmen organized in the county seat
of McKinney to terrorize African Americans into not voting. African
Americans continued to toil as farm labor after he RECNSCIS destruction,
(18:00):
and the white population kept them under tight control through
occasional outbursts of homicidal violence. In the summer of eighteen
ninety eight, local whites panicked when between thirty to forty
African Americans from out of town routinely gathered during a
rainy season in hopes to be on hand when the
weather cleared up so they could resume working. Ominous notices
began to appear around the town that said quote, mister Negro,
(18:24):
don't let the sun go down on you. On June
fifteenth of that year, klansmen warned black residents that they
had no more than ten days to leave the area.
One family, the Sebrons, became the target of a violent
mob of vigilantes known as white cappers, who arrived at
their home in the middle of the night to punish
them for not vacating their home on Main Street. Anticipating
(18:45):
the arrival of the terrorists, Jake Sebrin stood by the
door of his home holding a Winchester rifle. When his
assailants realized he had a gun, they fired into the house.
Jake then attempted to shoot back, but he was unable
to stop the assailants from fatally shooting his pregnant wife, Laura.
The three Cebrian children were found screaming and clinging to
bed sheets near their mother's bloody body inside their home.
(19:07):
When it was all said and done, White Capper violence
continued for years across the state, targeting both African Americans
and Mexican Americans in an effort to maintain white supremacy.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Thirteen years later, on August eleventh, nineteen eleven, Colin County
authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for allegedly flirting
with a white telephone operator. A mob of three hundred
outraged white sized Jones from police custody, carried him to
the city square and hanged him from a poll in
(19:38):
front of the telephone office. In spite of this, bloody history,
Colin County got rich, and by the nineteen seventies transformed
into a major urban center. This development correlated with white flight,
as Dallas glacially succumbed to court order desegregation beginning in
the nineteen sixties, and after uprising and response to a
(19:59):
Dallas police saw officer forcing a twelve year old Latino
Santos Rodriguez to play a fatal game of Russian Roulette
in the backseat of a police squad car.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
White flight fueled population explosion in Colin County, governed by
conservatives who kept property taxes low compared to those in
the metropolitan center to the south. Corporations followed this population
shift during the half century between the nineteen seventies and
the twenty twenties. Doctor Pepper, Friedo Lay, J. C. Penny, Curing,
Pizza Hut, and the Professional Golfers Association of America, as
(20:31):
well as Toyota, planted their corporate headquarters there. However, even
if whites moved to Colin County in the nineteen seventies
to avoid school integration and feared urban unrest, the new
corporations brought with them diverse work forces that include Muslims, Hindus,
and people of color from all around the world. In
two thousand, non Hispanic whites made up slightly more than
(20:53):
eighty one percent of the Colon County population. In twenty twenty,
that number was slightly less than fifty Asian Americans and
Asian immigrants made up almost seven percent of the population,
while Mexican Americans and immigrants from south of the Rio
Grand represented more than ten percent. All the ingredients needed
were present for a vicious racial backlash.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
By twenty thirteen, the right wing in the entire Dallas
Fort Worth area was in full panic mode about immigration.
In twenty nineteen, Texas was believed to have the largest
Muslim population of any state, numbering about four hundred and
twenty two thousand, still less than two percent of the
total state population, but one of the fastest growing religious
(21:38):
demographics in the area. Two thirds of that population lives
in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Muslim
worshippers pray it as many as fifty five mosque in
the Dallas Fort Worth area, and the Muslim population in
north central Texas is believed to have tripled since twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
In twenty thirteen, Harry Lerosieir won election as mayor in
the Collin County city of Plano. Conservatives mocked him at
the time as the quote mayor from Haiti, in reference
to his birthplace. When affordable multi family housing was proposed
for the suburb of Plano, fear quickly spread that black
and brown, low income workers would fill those residences. Signs
(22:19):
appeared that said quote, don't Dallas my Plano, referring to
the largely black and brown population in the metropolitan center.
Republican politicians across the Dallas Fort Worth area began to
warn that some of the newcomers plotted to impose quote Sharia,
or Muslim law. The panic stemmed from the practice of
many American mosques offering non binding mediation services, employing principles
(22:43):
from the Qur'an to couples in troubled marriages to resolve
bitter business disputes between Muslims and so on. Such arbitration
is not legally binding, and Muslim practices can't be imposed
on non Muslims because of the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution, which forbids the government from establishing any
sort of religion. Nevertheless, one Plaino State Representative Jeff Leach
(23:04):
in twenty fifteen introduced an anti sharia law in the
Texas legislature. His bill failed, but Governor Abbott later signed
a similar law in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Dread about Muslims and Sharia law dominated politics in Irving,
a suburb with a population of about a quarter million
people twelve miles northwest of Dallas for much of twenty fifteen.
In February, then Mayor Beth Van Dyne, who later became
a Trump appointee, characterized a Muslim mediation panel reportedly located
(23:49):
in the Islamic center of Irving as an Islamic court.
She introduced a resolution to the Irving City Council supporting
Leech's proposed legislation. It passed five to four, is reported
by a CBS affiliate in Dallas.
Speaker 10 (24:04):
Irving Mayor Beth Van Dyne has accused local Muslim leaders
in the past of creating their own laws called Sharia law,
and adjudicating that doctrine bypassing the state and federal court system.
Catholic and Jewish faiths also have similar tribunals that are
presided over by faith leaders who act as arbitrators, but
(24:25):
the locally mom here in Irving says Islam is being
targeted yet not breaking any law.
Speaker 11 (24:32):
They believe that we are trying to supersede the all
state laws, and that's not the case. We work within
the boundaries of federal and state law.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Anti Muslim tensions spread across the Dallas Fort Worth area,
ending in tragic violence. Anti Muslim extremists held a deliberately
provocative quote draw the profit art contest in Garland, Texas,
a city of about two hundred and thirty five thousand
just north of Dallas, knowing that the images of Ma
Shamed are prohibited by Islam and were likely to inflame
(25:03):
the broader Muslim community. Two heavily armed Muslim men took
the bait that day, driving from out of state and
arriving at the scene of the contest on May third.
They then shot a Garland police car before being killed
with return fire.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Little more than four months at the Garland shootings, Irving
police arrested Achmed Mohammed, a Muslim of Sudanese background, on
September fourteenth, twenty fifteen, after the fourteen year old had
brought a digital clock built as a personal science project
to MacArthur High School. Proud of his creation, Mohammed showed
(25:40):
the clock to one of his teachers, who subjected the
boy to racial profiling. Fearing the clock might be a bomb,
the teacher seized the device and sent Mohammed to the principal,
who then called irving police. Officers interrogated the boy for
ninety minutes while his parents were denied access to their son. Meanwhile,
a militia inspired by Irving Mayor Van Dine's alarmist warnings
(26:04):
of our Sharia law showed up at two mosque and
the Dallas suburbs, wearing camouflage and mask and brandishing twelve
gage shotguns as a stock worshipper's going to prayer.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Islamophobia in the Dallas Fort Worth area even extended to
deceased Muslims. The Islamic Association of Collin County had hoped
to establish a thirty five acre burial plot in Farmersville,
a town of about four thousand people. When the Farmersville
Planning and Zoning Commission approved the plan in May twenty
fifteen without a dissending vote, furious opposition erupted. According to
a CNN report.
Speaker 12 (26:37):
Farmersville is about twenty five miles away from Garland, Texas,
where in May police killed two Muslim gunmen who tried
to carry out a deadly attack at a draw the
prophet Mohammed event. One resident in Farmersville has even suggested
using pigs to scare away the Muslim group.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Peg and dump pig's bud and pig heads on a float.
Speaker 12 (26:58):
They won't buy the land.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
If I had my way, I would outlaw at Islam
in America. Farmersville resident Jack Hawkins declared that planning his
zoning commission meeting, quote, I would tear down every mosque
that was in this country. That's how I feel about it.
A local Baptist minister suggested that the cemetery would lead
to the establishment of the Madrasa, a Muslim religious school
(27:23):
that could become a training ground for extremists. He was
interviewed by CNN.
Speaker 13 (27:28):
And I believe I'm a watchman on the wall, Ezekiel
thirty three see the incoming danger.
Speaker 12 (27:32):
David Meeks is the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, which
ironically sits next to a cemetery. He says the cemetery
could bring radical Islam to Farmersville.
Speaker 13 (27:42):
I see the expansion of Islam that's going on all
over the world. Now it's come to my hometown.
Speaker 12 (27:48):
And you see that danger in a cemetery.
Speaker 13 (27:50):
Anytime you see the Islamic folks coming into a neighborhood,
I think, in my opinion, I think you can say
we could be less safe future than we are right now.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
One hundred opponents of the cemetery crowded into a July fourteenth,
twenty sixteen, city council meeting in Farmersville, with some residents
expressing the fear that Muslim corpses would countaminate the local
water supply. Members of the local Muslim community and of
the Farmersville City Council suffered threats of violence. Facing a
federal lawsuit, the City of Farmersville finally relented and on
(28:24):
September twentieth, twenty eighteen, allowed the Islamic Association to move
ahead with purchasing the land needed for their graveyard.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
This is the poison air. Patrick Crusius grew up breathing.
He didn't kill because of computer games, because they didn't
pray at schools he attended because a protest against police
violence or the collapse of respect for authority. Crusius wrote
that America is rotting, quote from the inside out, because
of immigration, and that unless whites took up arms against
(28:54):
dark skinned newcomers, whites could become extinct. In his manifesto,
this insisted he embraced the great replacement theory before Donald
Trump became president. One can only wonder how many other
self appointed racial warriors might be inspired of violence by
the twenty twenty four presidential campaign that centered mostly on
(29:16):
the purported dangers of what Trump repeatedly called migrant crime,
including the eating of neighbors, cats, and dogs in the
spread of deadly diseases. Trump has even repeated the warnings
of early twentieth century eugenicists about the biological damage he
claims immigrants are bringing bad genes to the United States.
(29:36):
He says Trump's incendiary anti immigrant rhetoric has been compiled
by the new site Politico.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating
inundation of illegal aliens. I said, if you let them in,
it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals.
These are stone cold killers. They'll walk into your kitchen,
they'll cut your throat. These are people at the highest
(30:06):
level of killing that cut your throat and they won't
even think about it the next morning. These people are
roaming our country. They could go into a restaurant, they
can do whatever they want, and they will kill you
because they are wired that way. These people are animals.
Now they'll say, oh, that's a terrible thing for him
to say. No, No, these people are animals. It's in
(30:27):
their jeans, and we got a lot of bad jeans
in our country right now.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
That tread a white genocide has been nurtured across centuries
of American history and has become one of this country's
major exports.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
And with politicians like Donald Trump stoking fear about the
alleged quote enemy within and promoting mass deportations and the
idea of quote remigration, which is a notion with a
deeply fascist history, we are almost certain to see the
great replacement panic continue to boil under the surface of
(31:02):
a society with constantly shifting demographics. Ongoing economic insecurity will
feed into this, and the passive acceptance of gun violence
as the price for American freedom will certainly feed into
future racist violence. This is Stephen Monticelli.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And This is Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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