The Gilroy Garlic Fest Shooter Plugged a White Power Manifesto on Instagram
On Sunday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, an annual summer festival in the quiet city of Gilroy, California, located about 30 miles south of San Jose. The gunman killed three people, including a six-year-old boy, and injured at least 12 others. Police said the gunman had been shot and killed and that authorities suspected he may have had an accomplice, who was still at large.
Although authorities initially did not reveal the identity of the shooter, local news station KPIX 5 reported he was a 19-year-old man named Santino Legan. Police recovered a backpack filled with ammunition at the scene, and they later searched his home and a second location.
Little is currently known about Legan: Though witnesses claim to have heard him say he was “really angry” while he was opening fire on the crowd, there’s not much indication as to his potential motive for the shooting. While his social media platforms appear to have been deleted as of Monday morning, one post on his alleged Instagram read: “Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.” Another post on the now-deleted Instagram included a picture of a Smokey the Bear sign advocating for forest fire prevention, with Legan writing in the caption: “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to cater to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?” then plugging the text Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
A 19th-century text of unknown authorship (its origins have been attributed to everyone from British author Arthur Desmond to Call of the Wild novelist Jack London), Might Is Right has long been considered a key text in the white supremacist movement, says Keegan Hankes, a senior analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project. “It’s widely popular and present among ethnocentric white nationalists of all levels, from suit-and-tie white supremacists to neo-Nazis,” Hankes tells Rolling Stone.
The text, which has been banned in multiple countries, essentially advocates for social Darwinism, or the idea that members of certain races or ethnicities are inherently better equipped for survival than others. The author argues that true egalitarianism does not and cannot exist, and that the “white race” is inherently biologically superior to other races.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/gilroy-garlic-fest-shooting-santino-legan-864594/
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