I’ve been a critic of the media for about 30 years now, specifically what’s come to be known as the mainstream media. It really started when I lived in Virginia and would pull my own hair out reading the Washington Post or listening to NPR. It was obvious that these outlets were biased. You could tell when they were pushing some kind of agenda or simply leaving out facts that didn’t help their case.

At the time there was no internet to speak of and your chances of getting a complaint published by a major newspaper were extremely slim. It was frustrating not just for me but for a lot of people who, for instance, thought Bill Clinton was a lying creep from the moment he appeared on the national scene.

Eventually the internet became a more viable place in which to discuss politics and media coverage. Around 2005 I, along with a million other people, started blogging and venting opinions online. And that was good. It turned out you could not only offer your opinions but, even better than that, you could uncover facts and point to evidence that people in the professional media were leaving out or downplaying. And because I cared about other people doing that, I tried not to do it myself. If the left has a point germane to what you’re writing about, you should mention it because if you’re right it doesn’t hurt and if you’re wrong it helps to have at least acknowledged that there were some things you didn’t know.

I started out this week by writing about the Texas mall shooting. When I started authorities didn’t seem to know much except the shooter’s name: Mauricio Garcia and his age. For some reason he went to a shopping mall and started killing people, seemingly at random. The motive was unclear.

We soon learned he had a patch on his vest which read “RWDS” short for right-wing death squad. That seemed to put him in a far-right camp but others pointed to a tattoo on his hand and were claiming it was proof he was a gang member. There was a wave of skepticism from the right with people pointing out the obvious: How could a guy named Mauricio Garcia be some kind of neo-Nazi? It honestly didn’t make a lot of sense and I wasn’t sure how to square that particular circle so I didn’t try. Either it would shake out in the end or it wouldn’t.

Put another way, reality is what it is. Doesn’t matter whether you like it or think it makes sense. As you may have heard, facts don’t care about your feelings and that cuts both ways. Sometimes the mass shooter is straight out of central casting and seems more like a left-wing caricature of the right than a real person.

So a few hours later the NY Times revealed that the shooter had an account on a Russian social media site called OK.RU which I’d never heard of before.

Investigators trying to learn why a gunman fatally shot at least eight people at a Texas mall are examining a social media profile, rife with hate-filled rants against women and Black people, that they believe belonged to the gunman.

The profile, found on the social media site OK.RU, matches the gunman’s birthday and refers to a motel where he was staying before the shooting. The profile also includes language praising Hitler, with references to neo-Nazi websites like The Daily Stormer…

The online profile being investigated also includes several pictures showing a black tactical vest with an RWDS patch. In addition, the profile includes a screenshot from Google Maps showing the time at which the mall where the shooting took place was likely to be busiest.

Though the writer of the posts suggests several times that they are of Hispanic origin — at one point indicating they are originally from Mexico — there is also a clear embrace of white supremacy. As recently as last month, the account contained a post saying that “white people and Hispanics have a lot in common.”

And here’s where things started to take a turn. Instead of incorporating the new information, I saw a lot of people on the right who were either choosing to ignore it or continue to mock the idea it could be possible. There might have been some honest confusion too because there were a couple of mugshots circulating which didn’t seem to match photos of the deceased shooter. It turns out that was because someone grabbed a mugshot of a guy named Mauricio Garcia (same name) who was three years older than the mall shooter. The actual shooter hadn’t been in trouble before so there are no mugshots of him.

In any case, a guy from Bellingcat eventually found the shooter’s account (the one identified by the NY Times) and posted some images from it. Those included a photo of the vest with the RWDS patch and a shirtless photo of someone with big Nazi tattoos. As I said at the time, it wasn’t clear if the photo was of the shooter (you couldn’t see his face) but his comment under the photo made it pretty clear how he felt “Here’s what I think about your diversity you f**king loser’s.” In other words, it didn’t matter if the tattoos were his. It was enough that he posted the photo as a response to diversity to see where he was coming from. He was pro-Nazi.

The Bellingcat guy started getting pushback and admitted he hadn’t verified if the photo was of the shooter. And because he hadn’t he deleted the tweet. And that’s about where I started seeing people announcing this was a psyop. A Trump guy who goes by Catturd called it the “most obvious psyop ever.” Even Elon Musk seemed to get in on it.

This gets weirder by the moment

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 8, 2023

Again, it is definitely weird to have a guy of Mexican descent getting Nazi tattoos but weird things happen sometimes. The bellingcat guy went back later and was able to show pretty convincingly that the photo of the Nazi tattoos is in fact a photo of the shooter.

Although Garcia’s face is not visible in the pictures, tattoos that can be seen on his arms match other photos where his face can be seen. For example, the 1 of the 10/6 (potentially a reference to the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland) tattoo he has is visible on his left upper arm in the swastika tattoo picture (above).

He posted a photograph of this 10/6 tattoo, that also showed tattoos of the Punisher logo and the words “Deus Vult”, on his inner right arm on Odnoklassniki in March 2022.

The same Punisher logo and “Deus Vult” tattoos can be seen in various photographs and videos on his OK page, including an August 2022 video of him at a shooting range.

Click on the link to see all the photos. It’s pretty clear this was him. And yet, some people are still talking about psyops by the CIA.

There’s a certain healthy amount of skepticism that is necessary when dealing with a media that is frequently biased, even intentionally so. But it worries me to see people on the right going beyond skepticism into borderline Alex Jones territory with talk about psyops, which feels like it’s one step from crisis actors.

The bottom line is that sometimes the news is legitimately hard to accept. Sometimes the mass shooter really is a neo-Nazi of Mexican descent. It’s weird and probably can be explained by mental illness, but what’s weirder is escaping reality into a fantasyland where any news you can’t cope with politically is part of a CIA psyop. Just stop already.