Shortly after 10 a.m. on Saturday, an unsigned document was posted to 8chan, a site that calls itself “the darkest reaches of the Internet.”

Its author appeared to be a twenty-one-year-old white man from near Dallas, Texas, who had just driven about nine hours to the border city of El Paso. According to the document, the young man was inspired by the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March. In Texas, his goal was to murder as many Hispanic civilians as possible. Carrying an AK-47-style assault rifle, he killed twenty people and wounded twenty-six others. Apparently, he intended to spark a race war—or, rather, to accelerate a race war that he already believed to be in progress. “Do your part and spread this brothers!” he wrote on 8chan. “Keep up the good fight.”

Read more