“I cannot say for certain he held Nazi views,” Dave Shafer tweeted about the Allen gunman, who had swastika and SS tattoos.
Shafer is only the second Allen-area politician and the first Republican to openly condemn Nazism in the wake of a mass killing perpetrated by Maurcicio Garcia, a 33-year-old man with a swastika tattoo on his chest who had included a Nazi symbol in his signature on government documents and a security guard application. Shafer is also the first to contradict statements made by the state law enforcement agency that is leading the investigation into the shooting.
“We do know he had neo-Nazi ideation,” said DPS Regional Director Hank Sibley. “He had patches. He had tattoos. Even his signature, you know, verified that. That’s one thing we do know.”
Shafer’s obfuscation of Garcia’s beliefs fits a broader pattern of responses from the political right wing that downplay white supremacist violence in the United States. After Garcia brutally murdered eight people in Allen on May 6, a chorus of right-wing figures cast doubt on the authenticity of the shooter’s writings and tattoos. Among them was an account that Shafer has retweeted known as The Red Headed Libertarian—the nom de plume of a woman named Josie Tait who works for right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool. After the shooting, Tait claimed without evidence that Garcia was a gang member and asserted that evidence the shooter watched Pool’s show was a “psy-op.” Elon Musk boosted Tait’s idea, replying “this gets weirder by the moment.”
Shafer indicated that part of his uncertainty around Garcia’s Nazi views is due to what he called “other supposed tattoos.” This echoes misinformation spread by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and the True Texas Project,