Ironically, Garcia says in that very post that if these acts of terror hold any meaning to him at all, it’s as a spectacle. This was, after all, most likely a deeply mentally unwell man whose worldview did not cohere in any way. Garcia often wrote in unintelligible, though not broken, English in a style suggestive of someone struggling with mental health problems. Many of his posts were difficult to follow, or made very little sense, like this one about shaking people’s hands. He frequently expressed despair, feeling as though he didn’t “even exist”.

In another post Garcia wrote, “It is my contention that the very roots of our mass shooting epidemic may be found in our core cultural value of fierce individualism.” He used the language of the incel community at times, examples being “oldcel” (someone whose celibacy is due to their older age), “Chad” and “Stacy”. Other times, he gestured to Right-wing memes. But mostly, he posted difficult-to-follow screeds about his loneliness accompanied by posts like this: “i wish i was dead, noone [sic] would care if i ceased to exist,” and “I’m worried that all these decades of loneliness have ruined me.”  

But there is a difference between someone who sees the swastika as a political symbol that motivates them to commit acts of violence and a mentally ill person who sees it as symbolic of chaos and discontent. Neither person is deserving of any apologia. However, one person is politically motivated, and another is a ticking time bomb who may not have the faculties to even have a modus operandi.

When you see tweet threads like Bellingcat researcher Aric Toler’s, which include quips like, “I guess we’ll never know if this guy was a liberal or fascist or anything else, oh well,” we’re not learning anything. Very little has been published about the alarming state of Garcia’s mental health (concerns over which led to him being discharged from the US military), or that his posts were those of someone who resented American individualism and saw life as a meaningless spectacle. 

This also isn’t meant to excuse Nazism which, I cannot emphasise enough, is a heinous ideology. It’s just that throwing together a grab bag of vaguely Right-wing personalities as some kind of proof that we have an unaddressed problem with white supremacist terrorism is worse than useless. We certainly don’t have any greater understanding of how and why a dark-skinned Mexican man might come to align himself with neo-Nazism, assuming we accept that these were his genuinely held beliefs and not a tool to alienate himself from others through shock value.  And, finally, the reporting being done on Garcia’s social media presence isn’t even instructive to help us understand the far-Right subcultures that do percolate online. 

Here’s what’s happening instead: people’s deaths are being used as pawns to condemn the American Right at large by conflating it and anyone who comes within 500 feet of it (like Tim Pool and Chaya Raichik) with the furthest reaches of the far-Right, about which the broader American public knows very little.

One of the more tragic elements of the story is that we will never come any closer to answers about why these horrific events happen.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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