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themysteriouswriter675 · 6 years ago

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Empty Frustration

Hello world. Although I’m sure almost no one’s reading this. The handful of followers whose attention I might have captured have probably lost me in the tsunami knows as Tumblr. Today I’ll try to revive myself, bang open the nails from one of the countless coffins Tumblr’s algorithm puts its millions of inactive users in, if you may. I’m a changed person from when I previously used to write- no longer invested heavily in changing the world, but rather scrambling to hold together the broken pieces within. I guess as my younger self sought to change society, to change norms, to shatter systems, and break glass ceilings, it forgot to take a peek inside itself and see that......there was nothing. Nothing but a fiery ego fueled for years by undeserved praise, nothing but a lazy feaster who does nothing besides waiting for the food to come to the table, without moving an inch towards it. And it was possible before. One might as well have forgotten there was anything to contend on the inside to begin with. One of the biggest shams ever sold to young people, was that your life, down the road, would be guided by what happens on the outside- outside events, outside obligations, outside people- that you would drown in your surroundings so much, that you didn’t have to contend with anything in your homeland. Of course, that’s only a torn half of the full page- no one warns the innocent of the real Goliath they have to slay. The real war that no one stocks up for hits them when they least expect it. One day they wake up and look at the mirror, and see more than they ever expected to. The highlights of one’s face brings visions that cannot be penned down, but yet their mind seems to retain even the slightest detail of, the tiniest speck at the most remote corner.

I’ve clearly become a far less skilled writer. But I feel more satisfaction writing this down than I ever did writing even my most brilliant stories. I’ve learnt a lot over the years, and one of the things I’ve learnt is that a machine will rip a human off into shreds when it comes to writing the most accurate, to-the-point piece one can. The chronology of the bulletproof, immaculate paragraphs of an algorithm almost seem to have been constructed, if I may, by decimal-precise instruments whose sole job is to not miss a single detail. And if that is what people set to imitate, then these words become strings of letters- writing loses meaning. I know that now. My previous self would hate the fact that I’ve interrupted my initial musings to go on a completely unrelated tangent. But I don’t deal in paragraphs anymore. Language points and content synchronization is no longer the lens through which I view my writings. I now deal in thoughts. In emotions. In stories. In conversations with voices from the inside. This writing won’t win prizes. But I’m at least able to write messages to the second person that has grown inside me. This person listens. This person responds. This person looks at the world and guides me based on what it gathers. This person isn’t me. This person isn’t someone else either. But this person exists, and will even drive you to a gun, or a bottle of sleeping pills, if it is provoked to. As we grow, this person becomes us. And I’m writing this to pen down what this person thinks of me.

Our days slowly morph, from the daily operations of an input-output algorithm, from a series of orders, from sports discussions, from childhood tiffin politics, from fretting over results, from mischievous giggles, from escaping relatives, from trying to fit ourselves into the grilles of our balcony, into something more morbid and harrowing. It turns into panic attacks, into anxiety, into stacks of unread books, into clinging onto friends who sometimes don’t cling back as much, into periods of time when the only two things you know are that you are looking at yourself and that tears are flowing out of your eyes, into week-long spans of running out of things to pat yourself on the back for. It is primarily that. The very idea that we can think for hours about what would happen if we die without flinching at the very idea in an instant amidst an unfaltering affection for reality should not be normal, but it is.

There can only be moments of digging upwards, reaching topsoil, and devouring the trees and the air before the dirt beneath the ground slides apart like quicksand. How long those moments are depends on how hard one can whip themselves into pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. Crafting that whip takes an extraordinary amount of religious dedication towards self-positivity and optimism manufacturing. It requires us to rip the ends of our receptors into oblivion till we are blind to the suffering that pulls us back again, howling, whimpering. The heart becomes heavy, our movements become more erratic during sudden moments to voluminous regret and frustration flowing through our cursed veins. We expect texts from people who, ultimately, don’t text. We expect people to notice us, feel our absence. It is all a fairy-tale. No one cares enough. At least the people you want to do not. You feel like abandoning people. But people do not need you. You need them. It takes a moment to wrap our heads around it. But one day, we look at ourselves, and realize, that the only well that quenches our thirst is contaminated with cyanide. There is no escaping the poisoning, the pain, because the alternative is utter destruction. Sometimes, the cyanide is purely fictitious, a figment of the imagination. But it is all the same. You feel a burning rage towards your friends. You call them scum of the earth, even though all they are doing is failing to live up to the sky-high expectations that the person inside you set.

But then again, all of this is before one opens the lid and look inside. All of these are simple iron pellets, shot at your body in preparation for the missile to come. You open yourself. Skin the flesh from the bone, rip the bone in half, and inside, there’s only Calcium. No feelings, no emotions, a person without a droplet of empathy. This is the body that you’ve been living inside for years. And imagine realizing that while you are alone, one day, when your life flashes by before your eyes, and the only thing you ever remember doing is hurting others. Hurting yourself. Thinking you are the best in the world. Building the lazy feaster whose body you would occupy one day. Imagine you distinctly remember the day it happened. Imagine that you cried for 4 hours straight. Imagine that the person you spent your whole life building is one that has personality dysphoria every night. A person that has developed the instinct to sit around and wait for things to happen. A person that cannot create order from the chaos he is given, and instead bathes in it, suffering in willingness, in complete submission to his self-annihilating nature. A person, who, in order to be forced to do something, has to be given the opportunity cost of severe physical or social penalties. One can only imagine it. Only those who have gone through it sit in front of a laptop at 1 a.m. and type it for the rest of the world to see.

One would think this is saddening. It is not. There is a part inside. Like a mother that screams to her child that exams are in 10 days. That part sees the fire that is coming to burn the trees. It sees the eerie calm before the storm. But I have become numb to my sheer incompetence. It is a sort of expressionless torture. It is the stick you grab to beat yourself that you care you do not have the energy to put to use. It is the fire that you light to burn yourself to make yourself feel the weight to your wasted years that you do not even feel like jumping to. I would say I feel like a robot. But a robot is programmed to do what it is told. I don’t even do that either.

The rotting mascot of a human being I made myself was stripped naked and put up on a humiliating exhibition. I decided that I can talk, and decided to open a page of my life that I want to burn with a lighter, rip slowly with my own fingers, as if to have the illusion that I’m causing it pain, drown it in cold, unforgiving water, and throw away in a lonely, isolated trash-bag. I decided to join debating. I don’t want to talk much about this part of my life(which still continues to this day though), because I know it way too well, and I feel like talking about it does no service to this exercise of self-therapy.

I didn’t plan an end to this excerpt. This was a photograph of my journey to being the pathetic human I am. Happiness, purpose, drive, love, inclusion- I am tired of being told that these things will come to me. I am not that long-haired sweetheart with a stable relationship and a thousand-page manual on social dexterity. I am not that sweet, wholesome person that everyone ascribes a positive contribution to their lives onto. I am not a sailor with a map. I’m a warrior that does not know how to wield a sword. A “nerd” who doesn’t study. A debater who doesn’t practice. A person that has manufactured a personality that I’m forgetting how to keep up. I’m nothing. There is nothing inside. A defunct car that has been pitched as a speed beast by salesmen who do not know the inside. This isn’t a story. An excerpt. This is a diagnosis. A periscope view. Of my inside. A pathetic, void-consumed, meaningless inside. I thought I would feel better after writing this. Turns out my emptiness has just been replaced by more of it.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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The Daily 202: Eight reasons to be skeptical that Trump is serious about his new call for ‘strong background checks’

By James Hohmann | Published August 05 at 10:39 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 5, 2019 9:13 PM ET |

THE BIG IDEA: We’ve seen this movie before. Will the remake end differently?

President Trump tweeted this morning that Republicans and Democrats should come together to pass “strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform,” so that those killed over the weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, will not have died in vain.

In a speech at the White House, Trump called for “red flag” laws, or extreme risk protection orders, to ensure people who “pose a grave risk to public safety” do not have access to guns — or so that their guns can be taken with “rapid due process.” He also directed the Justice Department to flesh out a proposal to ensure that those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty — and for capital punishment to be delivered “without needless delay.”

Then Trump opened the door to bigger action. “I am open and ready to discuss all ideas that will actually work,” he said.

Here are eight reasons to take this with a grain of salt. As always, watch what the president does more than what he says:

1. Trump talked a big game about the need to change gun laws after the February 2018 massacre in Parkland, Fla., but he never followed through with anything significant. He held a televised White House meeting with leaders from both parties during which, among other things, he expressed openness to raising the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21. But then he caved to pressure from the National Rifle Association and did an abrupt about-face. Instead, he created a Federal Commission on School Safety. A week before Christmas, the panel led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos quietly released a report that advised against increasing the minimum age required for gun purchases. The Trump administration did, however, move to ban bump stocks through the regulatory process after the Las Vegas massacre in October 2017. That ban went into effect this March.

2. The devil is in the details. Trump’s tweet today is generic and vague. He’s not endorsing any of the many proposals that have been floating around for years.

3. Trump has previously threatened to veto two background check bills that passed the House in February. Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly opposed both measures. “The first bill, receiving 240 votes — with just eight Republicans voting ‘yes’ — would extend existing laws to require background checks for all gun sales and most gun transfers,” Felicia Sonmez and Paul Kane note. “The second bill, which passed with support from three Republicans, aims to close the ‘Charleston loophole,’ a reference to the 2015 shooting in South Carolina. The gunman was able to purchase the weapons after a three-day federal background check failed to turn up a prior conviction, and this proposal would extend that window for completing a background check to at least 10 business days. Trump has threatened to veto both measures.”

4. Both bills are being pigeonholed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who is up for reelection in Kentucky next year and therefore has little incentive to upset his right flank. McConnell, who fractured his shoulder yesterday in a fall outside his Louisville home, is very unlikely to bow to calls for a special session to take the bills up.

5. Injecting immigration into the already fraught gun debate is a poison pill. Congress has been unable to act on guns or immigration because both are issues full of political land mines. The fact that Trump suggests they should be grouped — when both issues divide both parties — suggests strongly that this is more about messaging than a desire to put points on the board.

6. Time is on the gun lobby’s side. Congress’s summer recess is scheduled to last five more weeks. Five weeks is an eternity in politics, and the passage of time may sap momentum as the public’s attention turns elsewhere.

7. The NRA is weakened by scandal, but the gun lobby is still strong. The NRA played a pivotal role in getting Trump elected in 2016 by spending heavily in the states he flipped and activating conservatives in places such as Pennsylvania. But the group’s strength has always been the passion of its adherents. The Republican Party has grown more dependent on rural voters in recent years, who tend to be more opposed to gun control.

8. Trump’s divisiveness makes it harder for him to bring the country together, even if he’s earnest about wanting to do so. Just 38 minutes after calling for national unity this morning, Trump suggested that the media is to blame for the shootings. “Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years,” he tweeted. “News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!”

The president’s criticism of the media follows a string of articles that highlight the ways he’s fanned the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. “After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage,” White House bureau chief Phil Rucker writes on the front page of today’s newspaper.

The manifesto apparently written by the suspected shooter in El Paso closely mirrors Trump’s rhetoric, including language about a Hispanic “invasion” of Texas. “The author’s ideology is so aligned with the president’s that he decided to conclude the manifesto by clarifying that his views predate Trump’s 2016 campaign and arguing that blaming him would amount to ‘fake news,’ another Trump phrase,” Rucker notes.

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, pointed to that part of the manifesto. “People are going to hear what they want to hear,” he said on NBC. “My guess is this guy’s in that parking lot out in El Paso, Texas, in that Walmart doing this even if Hillary Clinton is president.”

-- Why this time could be different: Trump has the power to get something done if he wants. This could be his Nixon-to-China moment. During the brief period last year when Trump was calling for strict gun laws, polls showed Republican support for gun control surging. He’s popular enough with Republicans that he could strong-arm enough senators to pass a bill if he wanted to invest the political capital. Going into an election year, Trump may decide that passing a law strengthening background checks would boost his standing with suburban women and other constituencies he’s struggling with. Unlike last year, there’s a Democratic-controlled House.

Like Trump, there are Republicans in Congress who are up for reelection next year and might benefit from passing some bill on this issue. “I have long supported closing loopholes in background checks to prevent the sale of firearms to criminals and individuals with serious mental illness,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), whose approval rating has been tanking since she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, referring to the bipartisan measure by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) that failed to get 60 votes after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Conn.

MORE FROM TEXAS:

-- The 21-year-old man accused of slaying 20 people in an El Paso shopping center will be treated as a domestic terrorist, authorities said Sunday, adding that they are seriously considering charging him with federal hate crimes. Annie Gowen, Mark Berman, Tim Craig and Hannah Natanson report: “The suspect, Patrick Crusius, from suburban Dallas, is probably the author of a rambling, hate-filled manifesto posted on the 8chan website shortly before Saturday morning’s shooting, authorities believe, but they are still investigating. … In jail, Crusius has been cooperating with investigators and answering questions, officials said, though they declined to detail what he said. ‘He was forthcoming with information,’ said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen. ‘He basically didn’t hold anything back.’ ”

John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said the possible charges — including hate crimes and firearms charges — could carry a death sentence.

El Paso County District Attorney Jaime Esparza said the state has filed capital murder charges against Crusius. “We will seek the death penalty,” Esparza said Sunday.

The FBI is looking at a number of possible charges, said Emmerson Buie Jr., the special agent in charge of the bureau’s El Paso division.

-- “Crusius was raised in Allen, Tex., a predominantly white and affluent suburb north of Dallas. His childhood had challenges: His parents divorced in 2011, and his father chronicled a four-decade drug addiction in a self-published memoir. … As a student in Plano High School in 2017, he participated actively in calculus and law enforcement class. … After graduation, Crusius enrolled in Collin College, which he attended from fall 2017 to spring of 2019 … Crusius would often appear zoned-out during class, according to a classmate … During chemistry lab, the classmate said, the classmate noticed that Crusius frequently muttered to himself. After his parents divorced and sold the house in 2018, Allen police said, Crusius would frequently stay at different locations throughout the Dallas region, including with his grandparents, his mother and his father.”

-- Survivors said the shooter was calm and expressionless as he murdered people in a Walmart parking lot and then inside the store. Eli Rosenberg, Heather Long, Griff Witte and Alex Hinojosa report: “It was the second-to-last weekend before the start of school, and 1,000 customers had crammed into the Walmart Supercenter on Gateway Boulevard, where pens, notebooks and crayons were all on sale. Children filled the aisles, trying on new backpacks and clothes. The shoppers had come from both sides of the border that separates this Texas city from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. …

“For Robert Jurado, it began as a regular Saturday. He had taken his car to get washed, then ridden with his 87-year-old mother to the nearby Walmart for groceries. They were coming out of the store around 10:30 a.m. when they heard a loud bang. … There was a shooter in the parking lot, firing on anyone he encountered. As he walked, he fired — with no expression on his face. ‘He was, like, all calm,’ Jurado said. ‘He didn’t show no remorse.’ … Police say the first call about the shooter reached them at 10:39 a.m., and they arrived by 10:45 a.m., meaning the gunman was on the move for at least 15 minutes. …

“After his rampage through the parking lot, the gunman entered the Walmart — with CCTV footage capturing his arrival. … Most of Saturday’s victims were hit inside the Walmart, with a smaller number struck in the parking lot. The shooter kept firing after leaving the store, but then he abruptly stopped and drove away. Police officials said Sunday that they don’t know why. … Crusius was apprehended a short distance from the Walmart at 11:06 a.m.”

-- Mexican officials angrily denounced the shooting and raised the possibility of charging the perpetrator in Mexican courts. Mary Beth Sheridan reports from Mexico City: “President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said seven Mexicans were among the 20 killed in the attack Saturday in the border city, and seven more were wounded. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the country would take action under international law. ‘Mexico is indignant,’ he told journalists. ‘But we are not proposing to meet hate with hate. We will act with reason and within the law, but with firmness.’ The remarks represented a toughening of Mexico’s official reaction to the shootings. On Saturday, López Obrador appeared to play down the U.S. government’s responsibility for the violence, saying the attack was ‘a product of [societal] decomposition, of problems certain people have. It’s not a generalized issue.’ … López Obrador said Mexico didn’t want to get mixed up in the U.S. presidential campaign.”

-- Mexican authorities released a list identifying five of the Mexican nationals who were slain in El Paso. Among them were Sara Esther Regalado, of Ciudad Juarez, and Adolfo Cerros Hernández, of Aguascalientes: The couple lived in Ciudad Juarez and had been shopping at the Walmart when the shooting began, according to El Sol del Centro. Elsa Mendoza, of Yemopera, was a special ed teacher in Ciudad Juarez who was visiting family in El Paso with her husband and son at the time of the shooting, according to Zacatecas en Imagen. Maria Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, of Chihuahua, was in town to pick up her teenage daughter from the airport. She stopped at the Walmart while she waited for the flight to land, per Milenio.

-- U.S. authorities have not released an official list of victims. Among those identified:

Jordan and Andre Anchondo, of El Paso, had just marked their first wedding anniversary and their oldest daughter was turning 6, Andre’s older brother Tito said. They were preparing to show off their new house and were planning on throwing a big party on Saturday. They didn’t make it. The Anchondos and their infant son were at Walmart shopping for school supplies when the gunman opened fire, killing both parents and sending their baby to the hospital. The baby survived but had several broken bones. Jordan was a stay-at-home mother of three: the 6-year-old and 1-year-old daughters from earlier relationships and her and Andre’s 2-month-old. Leta Jamrowski, Jordan’s sister, said that, based on the baby’s injuries, it appeared that Jordan died while trying to shield the baby from the gunshots. (Rebecca Tan)

Arturo Benavides, of El Paso, was running errands with his wife, Patricia. They were almost out of the Walmart when the shooting began. Patricia was pushed into a bathroom stall and was able to get away unhurt but Arturo, who lived for his family, his dog and upside-down pineapple cake, didn’t make it. The couple had been married for more than 30 years. Jacklin Luna, his great-niece, said Arturo, a former bus driver and an Army veteran, was “always the first person to offer anything he had.” (Hannah Natanson)

Angelina Englisbee was on the phone with one of her sons just before the shooting began, and she told him she had to hang up because she was at the Walmart checkout line. That was the last her family heard from her, said her granddaughter, Mike Peake. Englisbee had seven children and a son who died in infancy, Peake said. She loved watching sports and “General Hospital.” “She was a very strong person, very blunt,” Peake said. (New York Times)

-- Jorge Sainz, a Mexican American pediatrician, described treating El Paso’s victims to the New Yorker: “This was getting close to military trauma. This guy wasn’t shooting a .22 or a little rifle. I was seeing scooped-out flesh. It kept coming. And coming.”

THE LATEST FROM OHIO:

-- The Dayton gunman killed his sister and eight others. Kevin Williams, Hannah Knowles, Hannah Natanson and Peter Whoriskey report: “In the hours before the mass shooting, siblings Connor and Megan Betts drove the family’s 2007 Corolla to visit this city’s historic Oregon District, an area alive on a summer night with restaurants, bars and nightlife. Then, police said, they separated. It is not clear what Megan, 22, did at this point. But Connor, 24, donned a mask, body armor and ear protection. Wielding an AR-15-like assault weapon with magazines containing 100 rounds, he set out on a street rampage that, although it lasted only about 30 seconds, killed nine people and injured 27 others, police said. Among the first to die was Megan Betts. Her male companion was injured, but survived.

“Less than a minute into the barrage, police patrolling the area saw people fleeing and neutralized Connor Betts — he was shot to death — as he was about to enter a bar where dozens of people had run in to hide. … Authorities said that in Dayton, four women and five men were killed. Of the 27 people who were injured, 15 had been discharged from a hospital as of Sunday afternoon. … The guns had been legally purchased, police said. …

“Midway through Betts’s freshman year at Bellbrook High School, the school became aware that he was toting around a ‘hit list,’ including classmates, of people he wanted to take ‘revenge’ on, said Samantha Thomas, 25, who attended Bellbrook at the same time Betts did. … ‘He got kicked out of school for it.’ David Partridge, 26, who also attended Bellbrook with Betts, said the list included a member of his family.”

-- Here’s more information on the victims, as collected by Post reporters:

Megan K. Betts, 22, spent the past couple of months as a tour guide helping visitors explore Montana at the Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center. Her former supervisor, Daniel Cottrell, said she was a “very positive person” and was well-liked by her peers.

Monica E. Brickhouse, 39, who lived in Virginia, was probably visiting family in her old hometown, said her childhood friend, Farren Wilmer. She was a mother of one and ran her own business. “She was always funny and smart and beautiful,” Wilmer said. “You know how kids always say, ‘I’m going to do this’ or ‘I’m going to do that?' Monica grew up and actually did what she said she was going to do. That’s the sort of person she was.”

Nicholas P. Cumer, 25, was a graduate of the cancer care program at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania and was working in Dayton as an intern for the Maple Tree Cancer Alliance, a treatment center, the organization said on Facebook. On the night of the shooting, he had been celebrating the end of the summer with friends. “He was intelligent, he was extremely caring and kind. He loved his patients, and he always went above and beyond for them,” said Tyler Erwin, one of his co-workers who was at the scene of the shooting. Cumer was one week away from completing his internship.

Derrick R. Fudge, 57, was out with relatives when the shooting began, his sister, Twyla Southall, said. “He was a good man and loved his family,” she said.

Thomas J. McNichols, 25, was a father of four whom an aunt described as a “gentle giant.” “Everybody loved him. He was like a big kid,” the aunt, Donna Johnson, told WHIO-TV. His four children are all between the ages of 2 and 8.

Lois L. Oglesby, 27, was the mother of two, her uncle Joe Oglesby said. The nurse’s aide had just had her second baby last month.

HATE IS CONTAGIOUS:

-- This weekend reflected how American violence — quickly and effortlessly — goes viral. Marc Fisher reports: “Whether the proximate cause was political or personal, whether it grew out of ideological indoctrination, mental illness or some toxic blend of factors that left shooters isolated and damaged, each attack demonstrated a troubling disorder festering in modern America. … ‘These are not single shooters,’ said Daniel Okrent, author of ‘The Guarded Gate,’ a history of anti-immigrant bigotry in the United States. ‘They’re a mob with high-powered rifles, people who feel they’re part of something bigger. The technology has changed: A mob doesn’t have to get together in the street with torches anymore.’ …

“Whatever label is attached to any mass shootings committed by anti-immigrant extremists, they should be viewed not as individual acts but as part of a contagion, said J.M. Berger, a researcher on terrorism and propaganda and author of ‘Extremism.’ ‘Social media allows a lot of people with similar ideological ideas to synchronize their actions,’ Berger said. … The notion that a ‘great replacement’ of whites by some other group is being encouraged by powerful forces is often credited to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who wrote a 2012 book called ‘The Great Replacement.’ … On Sunday, Camus denied responsibility for the El Paso shooting, but endorsed the ideas Crusius may have touted in the manifesto. ‘It is obviously not ‘The Great Replacement,’ the book, which causes the mass massacres,’ Camus wrote on Twitter. ‘It is the great replacement itself.’”

-- “There are no lone wolves,” writes Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security: “White-supremacist terror is rooted in a pack, a community. And its violent strand today is being fed by three distinct, but complementary, creeds. The community has essentially found a mission, kinship and acceptance.”

-- The FBI insists it is fully engaged in combating the threat of violence from white supremacists, but some veteran counterterrorism experts say the bureau has been doing far too little despite internal concerns that have been building up for more than a decade. Devlin Barrett reports: “Dave Gomez, a former FBI supervisor who oversaw terrorism cases, said he thinks FBI officials are wary of pursuing white nationalists aggressively because of the fierce political debates surrounding the issue. ‘I believe Christopher A. Wray is an honorable man, but I think in many ways the FBI is hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would,’ Gomez said. ‘There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It’s a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor. … I don’t think there’s any faith by the FBI right now that the Justice Department is an independent law enforcement organization,’ he said. ‘I think the FBI is up to the challenge of investigating white nationalism and white supremacy as a domestic terrorism threat, they just have to be allowed to do it.’”

-- Three of this year’s mass shootings began with a hateful screed on the anonymous message board 8chan, one of the Internet’s most venomous refuges for extremist hate. Drew Harwell reports: “Like after the shootings in Christchurch and the Chabad of Poway synagogue, the El Paso attack was celebrated on 8chan as well: One of the most active threads early Sunday urged people to create memes and original content, or OC, that could make it easier to distribute and ‘celebrate the [gunman’s] heroic action.’ … The message boards tied to mass violence have fueled worries over how to combat a Web-fueled wave of racist bloodshed.

“The El Paso shooting also prompted the site’s founder to urge its owners to ‘do the world a favor and shut it off.’ ‘Once again, a terrorist used 8chan to spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it,’ Fredrick Brennan, who founded 8chan in 2013 but stopped working with the site’s owners in December, told The Washington Post. ‘The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.’ …

“The site has for years been shielded by U.S. laws that limit websites’ legal liability for what their users post and has been further protected by an Internet infrastructure that makes it difficult to take sites down. Some online researchers also fear that a shutdown of 8chan would only spur hate groups to organize elsewhere. … The site is registered as a property of the Nevada-based company N.T. Technology and owned by Jim Watkins, an American Web entrepreneur living in the Philippines. Asked for comment, Watkins replied with a single sentence: ‘I hope you are well.’”

-- Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company that houses 8chan, announced it will stop hosting the website after this weekend. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, explains why in a blog post: “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit. We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive — regardless of the content of those websites. … We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line.”

-- Bystanders shared videos of El Paso’s violent aftermath, and strangers online begged them to stop. Abby Ohlheiser reports: “One video posted Saturday, with more than 250,000 views on Facebook, appears to begin outside [the El Paso Walmart]. … A man, whose Facebook name matches that of a witness to the shooting quoted by media outlets, walks inside the store while filming on his phone. He approaches a body, face down in the entrance, in a pool of blood. Another bystander is already there, phone also pointed toward the body. The two nearly collide, both watching their phones. … More than 4,000 people have shared this video, which was streamed live and now carries a graphic content warning from Facebook. But others, in the video’s comments, pushed back. ‘Stop filming,’ one Facebook user wrote as the live video was broadcast.”

DIVIDED AMERICA:

-- Walmart has a complicated history with guns. Derek Hawkins and Morgan Krakow report: “In addition to being the world’s largest retailer, Walmart is often referred to as the world’s largest gun retailer. … But Walmart’s relationship with firearm sales has been fickle in the 26 years since it made the landmark decision to stop carrying handguns. As economic and political winds have shifted, so have Walmart’s gun policies, though the general trend has been toward more restrictions. … Last year, Walmart said it would raise the minimum age to buy a firearm or ammunition from 18 to 21 and remove products resembling assault-style rifles, such as airsoft guns and toys, from its inventory … In 2006, Walmart announced that it would stop selling firearms entirely at all but a third of its U.S. stores, which then numbered around 3,000. … Just two years later, Walmart made it harder to buy firearms at the stores that were still selling them. …

“But when the economic recession took hold in 2009, Walmart’s sales slumped. And after a five-year hiatus at most of its locations, the company started filling up shelves with shotguns, rifles and ammunition. … In 2012, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., Walmart resisted calls to stop selling assault-style rifles such as the Bushmaster AR-15 … Three years and numerous mass shootings later, however, Walmart did stop selling the AR-15 and similar weapons. … Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who has headed the company since 2014, has stressed that he wants to cater to hunting and sports shooting, the things [founder Sam] Walton enjoyed.”

-- This is what perpetual war looks like in America, writes our art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott: “When we saw images of the war dead from Iraq or Afghanistan, they were surrounded by an architecture that seemed odd, often low-rise buildings made of dun-colored concrete. When a bomb blast tore a hole in the facade of a distant city, we stared into the gaping vacuity at disorderly domestic spaces that were strange and unrecognizable, full of clothes, appliances and shattered dishware that wasn’t like the stuff you find at Walmart. Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.”

-- The Navy’s football team in Annapolis apologized and changed its initial motto for the 2019 season: “Load the clip.” Cindy Boren reports: The phrase “was deemed inappropriate and insensitive in a community still recovering from a fatal shooting last year in the Capital Gazette newsroom, only a few miles from Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. … ‘We sincerely apologize if it upset anyone, but it was not meant to be taken the way it may have been by some,’ said Coach Ken Niumatalolo. ‘We understand that it probably wasn’t appropriate considering the current climate and certain things that are happening in our society.’”

-- It wasn’t just Texas and Ohio: Gun deaths were reported all over the country this weekend. From ABC News:

In Chicago, at least three people were killed and 37 more injured this weekend in shootings within city limits, including 22 people shot Sunday in less than four hours, according to the Chicago-Sun Times.

In Shreveport, La., a 1-month-old girl was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting.

In Charles County, Md., officers responded to a call that a 42-year-old man shot and killed his in-laws. The suspect, police said, then shot at an 11-year-old boy who was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. The man, Mark Hughes, was later found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the sheriff’s office.

In Pinellas County, Fla., deputies shot and killed a 35-year-old man after police said he pointed a 12-guage shotgun at them. The man, the sheriff’s office said, was a suspect in the fatal shooting of his mother.

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