The top story on Breitbart’s home page on Wednesday morning titled “In Memoriam: 14 Americans, Legal Immigrants Among Those Allegedly Killed by Illegal Aliens in 2023,” lists nine homicide and four vehicular accident victims dead at the hands of undocumented immigrants, plus an edge case of a Florida sheriff’s deputy who tragically collapsed and died of a “cardiac dysrhythmia” after a lengthy struggle with an illegal alien suspect who was nonetheless charged with murder.
This compares with 18 dead in Lewiston, Maine in October at the hands of Robert Card, a far right militia cosplayer who hated trans people and was a fan of Jim Jordan, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr, 8 dead in Allen, Texas at the hands of Mauricio Garcia, a 4chan incel Nazi who wore far right patches when he went on a shooting spree in a mall in May, three Black Americans dead in Jacksonville, Florida at the hands of white nationalist incel Ryan Palmeter in August, a six year-old Palestinian-American Illinois boy who was stabbed to death by his MAGA landlord Joseph Czuba.
That’s at least 30 total murdered by far right domestic terrorists, twice as many listed by Breitbart as killed either intentionally or negligently by illegal aliens, and three times the number murdered outright. We’re almost certainly missing at least a few more one-or-two-off deaths. Among the victims Breitbart tallies are the five family members massacred by that sick fuck in Cleveland, Texas in late April. To their (very, very marginal) credit, it does not appear that any of Breitbart’s past articles about the case employ the term “illegal alien” to describe the immigration status of the victims of that horror, instead using “Honduran migrants.” This is in contrast to Gov Greg Abbott, who explicitly referred to them as “illegal immigrants” when offering a $50,000 reward for the killer’s capture, despite the fact that at least one of the victims was a legal permanent US resident.
That part’s noteworthy because Breitbart specifically uses “Legal Immigrants” in the headline, which is misleading to their own audience, likely for the same purpose as the “Honduran migrants” in the past articles about the Cleveland, Texas massacre: They’re trying to gently evoke sympathy, or at least have some plausible deniability editorially, for their white nationalist fanbase who otherwise would no doubt be writing “Who gives a shit if one illegal kills another?” Indeed nine of the 14 victims have Hispanic surnames, leaving the possibility that at least some of them, even beyond the several among those killed in Texas, were also undocumented. “Just doing the job the government refuses to do,” one Breitbart reader wrote on the May 18th article “Previously Deported Accused Killer of 5 Honduran Migrants Appears in Texas Court.” If there’s a translation for that comment other than simply “I’m glad that illegal alien murdered those other illegal aliens” we’d love to hear it.
And why should Breitbart let some of the slightly more honest commenters distract from the real subtext of their article? Despite the “In Memoriam,” it isn’t really about the victims, it’s the perpetrators. The illegal aliens that are invading this country and negligently killing or intentionally murdering far more other members of their communities than they are non-Latino US citizens. If they’re pouring in by the tens of thousands every day, caravans as far as they eye can see, then why can’t one of the leading right wing propaganda outlets come up with more than 14 victims?
And that’s still not any more than the number of people killed in massacres by MAGA freaks (most of them wielding AR-15s) this year. The paragraph above listing just four deadly incidents of domestic terrorism in 2023 was the one part of this article that took the least time to write. It was very easy to demonstrate that armed right wing fanatics are a quantifiably deadlier threat to Americans than the “invasion on the southern border” has been. Breitbart needs to step up their game.