Within the context of the erroneous claims made in other posts of this thread (not yours I'm quoting) about the perpetrator of the El Paso massacre, I find the philosophies of the German philosopher with the same surname who lived centuries ago to be rather ironic. Much of the work of Christian August Crusius is esoteric, mainly referenced in regards to his influence on and conflict with other far more prominent philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment, but I did study a bit of it in a class about Kant. IIRC, the philosopher Crusius argued that outside the realm of mathematics with its properties of certainty, human reason cannot reach any ultimate truth. That our notions of identity and contradiction are based on an inner criterion; that truth is essentially based on what is cogitable to us. He theorized that what cannot be thought of as false is therefore true. But he also argued that this principle is precarious. He believed a spirit who can neither err nor deceive originally implanted natural laws in us, but false principles are mixed in as well by the "father of lies." So with the lack of sure criteria for distinguishing an authentic origin from a spurious one, even our own cognition isn't reliable because we cannot ascertain between the spirit of truth and the work of the deceiver. So one can then choose to believe what he wants to believe despite facts to the contrary. Perhaps it's why humans are so malleable to misinformation, to controlling their perceptions based on chosen ideology and rejecting what should be self-evident if its in conflict with that ideology. I have no idea if Orwell ever read Crusius when writing about doublethink, about how even in math with indisputable answers people can be trained to ignore that and 2+2=5 can be accepted as fact. In our current era "Make Orwell Fiction Again" has been popularized because of the acceptance of patently false dogma and propaganda.
Last year the former chief security officer at Facebook joined the faculty of my school, after having been on the advisory board of our Cyber Policy program for years. He created a lab where amongst other things relating to cybersecurity and policy, they track the origins of trending misinformation, and how it's disseminated. One of my friends who is a part of it has had to put on a virtual hazmat suit and jump into the online cesspools of hate such as 8Chan, a forum which has been linked to three atrocities this year (it's currently, thankfully, offline), and other sites popular with those who embrace white nationalist ideology. He goes to the very sites the FBI does when investigating domestic terrorism threats. It's on those sites that misinformation about the El Paso shooter originated, such as him being Hispanic and the last name being of Portuguese descent. Posters on those sites have gone to feverish, elaborate extents to prove their entirely false assertions. You're right to have described it as ridiculous, disingenuous deflection, and silly. But, more than all that, I think it's about tribalism. From what my friend who was waded through it said, the main point the white nationalists are making is, he's not one of
them. He's not truly white, therefore he's not really part of their tribe. He can be classified as an "other." Misinformation is sort of like a contagion, those infected with it can bring it with them and spread it around, sometimes with that express intent. The very ones who tend to guffaw about Russia's influence actually are prone to unknowingly reposting content generated by Russian troll farms, which also has a team to trawl through such sites hunting for material. The whole point of those farms is, more than anything, to cause divisiveness among Americans, to have us distracted from the massacre itself to be instead discussing conspiracies about the shooter (they also have generated a ton of tweets to distract from mass shootings to other types of violence or harm.) So that's how it got spread through Facebook, on Twitter, in the sections of Reddit dedicated to "The Donald," and now on CF.
It's dismaying how the shooter who, from the accounts given, grew up being nourished with love by a caring family, taught compassion, and the difference between right from wrong, can then commit himself to rejecting that and choosing hate. His mom had contacted the police weeks before the shooting to relay her concerns about him owning the semi-automatic rifle, so she was still an active presence in his life. I think the shooter having immersed himself in those cesspools of hate contributed to his heart and mind being infected with racist poison, to him believing the "father of lies" rather than the spirit of truth.