Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman referred to 'Might is Right' manifesto before shooting

[SummerMadness]

Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman referred to 'Might is Right' manifesto before shooting

The gunman who killed three people and wounded a dozen more at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California was an angry 19-year-old who had recently waded into the world of white supremacy.

Santino William Legan, who was shot dead by police Sunday before he could do more damage, posted online about an 1890 racist manifesto, "Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest," NBC News confirmed.


"Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard," Legan posted on his Instagram page. He then used a slurs against mixed-race people and misogynistic descriptions of white Silicon Valley workers, complaining about "hordes" of them "overcrowding" towns.

Redbeard, which was a pseudonym, argued that only strength and violence determined what is morally right. The work, which is filled with misogynistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, is a staple among neo-Nazis and white supremacists on extremist sites.

 

[essentialsaltes]

It's quite a thing. A mashup of Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, women-as-objects, racism, unrestrained egoism.

 

[Go Braves]

Unfortunately, this is exactly what I suspected when I found out about the shooting.

 

[mkgal1]

A psychologist by the name of Philip Zimbardo did a study years ago about how people are able to get to the point of doing evil acts. This is his TEDTalk on the topic:

Transcript of "The psychology of evil"

And his website:

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Quoting from Zimbardo's site:
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007). In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.

Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.

t the core of evil is the process of dehumanization by which certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as less than human, as non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to those who do the labeling. Prejudice employs negative stereotypes in images or verbally abusive terms to demean and degrade the objects of its narrow view of superiority over these allegedly inferior persons. Discrimination involves the actions taken against those others based on the beliefs and emotions generated by prejudiced perspectives.

Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a “cortical cataract” that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and even annihilation. ~ The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo​

 

[mkgal1]

Feel free to explain why one book and a quote doesn't make a white supremacist and I'll gladly move along. If you can't, quit whining about my posts.

I doubt it was just "one book". Most likely, this guy found out about that book from an online forum that fueled his hatred (because that is the typical scenario).

From Washington Post:
White supremacist Wade Michael Page posted in online forums tied to hate before he went on to murder six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012. Prosecutors said Dylann Roof “self-radicalized” online before he murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina in 2015. Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 elderly worshipers at a Pennsylvania synagogue in October, had been active on Gab, a Twitter-like site used by white supremacists.

just a few weeks ago, a 30-year-old D.C. man who described himself as a white nationalist was arrested on a gun charge after concerned relatives alerted police to his violent outbursts, including saying that the victims at the synagogue “deserved it.” Police say the man was online friends with Bowers. ~ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...iolence/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e8bbd1bce300​

 

[SummerMadness]

I did read the OP and other posters. When you say "the arguments I'm making are the arguments they're making" - who is "they"? The author of the WP article? Because you seemed to be mocking the idea that "one book" can be a factor in hate-based crimes (but maybe I'm misunderstanding your posts).

It's fairly evident that the reference to the book indicates a possible wider level of radicalization. There still needs to be a thorough investigation, but it looks like yet another attack by a white supremacist; I don't think it will be a surprise to find that he was radicalized online.

 

[FreeinChrist]

MOD HAT

This thread had a clean. Please discuss the topic in the OP.
​

​

​

 

[essentialsaltes]

Police found extremist material during a search of a Nevada home they believe the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter once rented, according to law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.

The seized material pertained to different -- and at times, competing -- political ideologies, and authorities have yet to nail down a clear ideology to which Santino Legan subscribed, the source said.

Thanks for being vague, source.