Final words: Gunman may fit familiar pattern of spouting hate on the internet
The Gilroy Garlic Festival killer must have known his violence would lure people to his Instagram account, where he posted cryptic messages shortly before opening fire.
Santino Legan first jeered the event, captioning a photo of tents and revelers, “Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overprice s—.” His tone darkened as he criticized demographic changes in his South Bay hometown and touted a 19th century book, “Might Is Right,” that has seen a revival in white supremacist circles.
“Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Val
ley white twats?” Legan asked.
Little more is known so far about the mindset of Legan, who killed three people and wounded 12 others before being shot dead by Gilroy police. He described online his identity as Iranian and Italian, using the flags for the countries, but didn’t offer much else on accessible websites.
A federal law enforcement source told The Chronicle that a search of an apartment the young man recently rented in Walker Lake, Nev., turned up not only a gas mask and a bulletproof vest but also documents relating to white supremacy and Islamic extremism. But FBI investigators hunting for a motive said they are moving cautiously, reviewing Legan’s past conversations and enlisting criminal analysts and profilers. They stressed they do not have clear evidence of a motivating ideology.
Still, some experts see signals that the Gilroy shooting may fit a pattern of mass killers whose views have been sculpted online. Many of them follow a similar script: Before raising their guns, they disseminate messages on social media, as though to establish themselves as warriors for a larger cause even though they are about to target innocent people.
“There’s a motivating factor here that’s much more personal ... than extremist ideology,” said Erroll Southers, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in violent extremism.
Southers described these shooters in a way that appears counterintuitive: They commit acts of brutality, but want to be remembered for doing something noble.
Thus, the man who fired a semiautomatic rifle into a crowded San Diego synagogue in April posted a screed on the website Pastebin. The shooter who rampaged into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, distributed a manifesto on 8chan. And last year, the gunman who opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh shared antiSemitic messages on a small social network called Gab.
These violent sprees, experts say, are in part an outcropping of the internet age. As more and more ideological fringe groups proliferate online — whether organized or loosely affiliated — they provide 24hour echo chambers.
To Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino, the digital networks or circles are more pernicious than inperson meetups between racists or religious radicals.
“In the old days, you’d join a hate group, go to a bar and hang out, trade hate books, trade hate music,” Levin said. Members of the group might have bizarre or hateful beliefs, he said, but at least they had peers around to moderate them.
That’s a sharp contrast to the digital world of walltowall vitriol and bigotry that’s always available, he said, and might seem particularly compelling to a young person who experiences most social interactions online.
A new study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism suggests that white supremacy is the most ascendant form of hate around the country. While the overall number of extremist homicides decreased, from 36 in 2017 to 22 last year, the number seen as driven by white supremacy rose from 13 to 17.
The internet has become “an increasingly radicalized and fragmented incubator,” the report said.
Comments surged on the unmoderated and often vicious website 4chan, from fewer than 1 million per month in 2015 to roughly 5.5 million in the month of the 2016 presidential election, before leveling off to about 3.5 million per month early last year.
These corners of the internet, Levin said, have helped resuscitate old texts such as “Might Is Right,” while promoting folkloric narratives “that glorify the lone wolf who has been disrespected but is going to fight back.”
To Southers, the USC professor, Legan’s comments about changing demographics align with a racist doctrine called “replacement theory,” based on the idea that white women are not having enough babies, and that the falling white birth rates, combined with immigration, will result in white people being replaced by nonwhite people. “White genocide” is a common hashtag on white nationalist sites.
The Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant, cited the theory in a 74page document that he distributed online before killing 51 people.
John Bennett, the FBI special agent in charge of Bay Area operations, said Wednesday that it was too early to define what drove Legan. He said there is a lot of work to do.
“We’re still not comfortable in saying it’s an ideology one way or another,” he said.