Counter-Currents
Salvador Ramos
1,334 words
This spring has yielded a bumper crop of high-profile mass shootings motivated by fearlessly robust racial and ethnic animus. It was only a little over a month ago that a white-hating black man shot up a Brooklyn subway car. On May 11, an Asian-hating black man allegedly shot three at a Dallas hair salon. Three days after that, a black-hating white man killed ten at a Buffalo supermarket. The next day, a Taiwanese-hating former Chinese mainlander shot up a California church.
On Tuesday, an 18-year-old Hispanic male in a southwest Texas town that is four-fifths Hispanic killed two Hispanic teachers and 19 mostly Hispanic schoolchildren. By the time he was finished, gunman Salvador Ramos had piled up nearly twice as many corpses as all four aforementioned shooters combined. Since the shooter, nearly all of his victims, and all of the high-school tormenters and deadbeat family members who allegedly bullied him into such a catastrophic display of retaliatory violence were Hispanic, race ceases to be a motivating factor.
Apart from Tariq Nasheed referring to Ramos as a “white Hispanic” on Twitter, most of the media narrative that emerged while EMTs were still hauling away 10-year-olds in body bags tended to slalom entirely around the topic of race, especially the gunman’s inconvenient lack of whiteness. They mostly made it about gun control.
Ramos didn’t leave a manifesto. The scraps of his social-media posts I saw before they were all scrubbed from the Internet seemed devoid of any political sentiments whatsoever. He had no apparent girlfriend, but then again, I’m aware of no public statements he ever made that blamed his personal misery on women. He appeared to be creeping on some teen girl from Los Angeles in the hours before the shooting by sending her images of his guns and vague intimations that he was about to do something huge, so apparently he hadn’t given up on trying to impress the opposite sex.
Shortly after the massacre, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted that Ramos was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien,” a statement impressive in that it managed to get everything wrong. Ramos was born in North Dakota and recently relocated to Texas. There’s nothing to suggest he had Leftist political sympathies — or sympathy for anything or anyone besides himself. He took pouty selfies in which he appears to be wearing makeup, but there’s no evidence he ever claimed to be a female or wore a dress or had his genitals mutilated or was a homosexual. Sexually, he appeared to be only interested in women; several female coworkers at Wendy’s accused him of sending them “inappropriate” messages.
Is it possible that there’s absolutely no feasible political angle to this massacre? Does the personal always have to be political? I don’t think so. Not unless you want or need it to be. Sometimes personality types transcend race and culture and politics. Sometimes social dynamics operate the same way regardless of the society in question.
Can we at least agree that no matter what their political leanings, no one who is socially well-adjusted and of sound mind grabs a rifle and starts blasting schoolchildren? Everything I’ve read so far about Salvador Ramos fits the personality profile of nearly every other mass shooter in history regardless of race, creed, or religion. Troubled. Loner. Quiet. Bullied. Estranged from his family and his peers. A young man with nowhere to go and nothing to do but explode. Justified or not, this kid hated his life and the world. And the world, justified or not, hated him back.
Ramos’ rampage is most similar to 1999’s Columbine massacre in that the perpetrators seemed to be equal parts bullying victims and aggressively antisocial assholes themselves.
According to all accounts, Ramos was afflicted with a lifelong stutter and a lisping inflection that led to ceaseless mistreatment at the hands of other kids.
His cousin Mia told reporters that she witnessed him being harassed by other students for his speech impediment and that it probably led to him dropping out of classes before graduating from high school this year: “He wasn’t very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter. I think he just didn’t feel comfortable anymore at school.”
“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” said Stephen Garcia, who says he was best friends with Ramos in eighth grade. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything. . . . He was the nicest kid, the most shyest kid. He just needed to break out of his shell.”
Ramos was also reportedly taunted by other students with anti-gay slurs after posing for a selfie wearing eyeliner. In a culture built on machismo, one risks being called a maricon for such antics.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.
But according to some peers, Ramos was as much a malicious instigator as he was an innocent target. As society turned its back on him, he made a display of pushing it away. He indulged in all sorts of antisocial behavior such as egging cars and shooting random passersby with a BB gun. He wore black clothes and military boots. He told people he wanted to join the Marines for the sheer joy of killing people. He challenged strangers to boxing matches. According to former friend Santos Valdez, Jr., Ramos once pulled up to a local park with his face covered in cuts. At first he said he’d been scratched by a cat. Then he said he’d been in a fight. “Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said. “I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?” Ramos replied that he did it for fun.
Both of Ramos’ parents have criminal records. His biological father apparently abandoned him from the get-go. His mother is allegedly a drug addict with whom he’d have frequent screaming matches that led to multiple police visits, one of which he allegedly livestreamed, calling his mother a “bitch” for all the world to see while the cops strained to disentangle another ugly domestic situation.
A few months ago, young Salvador packed up and left mom and her new boyfriend and moved across town into his 66-year-old grandmother’s house. On May 16, grandma took him to Applebee’s to celebrate his 18th birthday. The next day, he purchased a rifle. Then he purchased several hundred rounds of ammo. Then he bought another rifle.
On Tuesday, he shot his grandmother in the head. She survived.
He then stole her pickup truck and crashed it into a ditch near Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. He barricaded himself inside a fourth-grade classroom, told everyone they were going to die, and proceeded to snuff the flames out of 21 candles.
He was such a quiet boy.
“I never expected him to do what he did. He’s quiet and kept to himself most of the time. I really only had a handful of conversations with him,” said his mother’s new boyfriend. “He stayed to himself; I really didn’t have a relationship with him. He didn’t talk much, he was a loner.”
“He was very quiet, he didn’t talk very much,” his grandfather told a TV reporter.
“He felt like the quiet type, the one who doesn’t say much. He didn’t really socialize with the other employees,” said his former evening manager at Wendy’s.
“He was the quiet type. And they say that he did like to play those shooting video games, Call of Duty and Modern Warfare,” said a man whose son attended the same school as Ramos.
You always have to beware of the quiet types. As they say, still waters run deep. Or sometimes they just go crazy.
Did Ramos do this because everyone picked on him, or did everyone pick on him because they sensed he’s the type that would do something like this
I think that all societies — even self-contained, racially and linguistically homogeneous societies near the Mexican border — can go too far with the bullying.
And sometimes, the people they bully can overreact.
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25 comments
His car crashed as result of a police chase. How were they not right on his tail as he entered the school. I have a feeling we will see another Parkland type situation where the cops stood around afraid to go in.
It turns out you were right! This newest generation of police mostly resemble social workers trained in how to deal delicately with others feelings, not men who can act heroically when needed.
These gut churning tragedies raise endless dialogue. Should this kid have been able to buy a gun? Was he the disciplined NRA-type? Kids with social and mental health problems don’t relate well to others. They end up bullied and try to shift their situation in heavy handed ways – going dark and creepy so as to scare off further attacks. The answer is not so easy. Should they be coddled endlessly as victims of bullying? As we saw with any sympathy given to minorities, transgenders and women the past few decades…. Give victims some limitless power and a chunk of them will endlessly abuse it and make themselves the center of attention – seeing abuses and conspiracies everywhere with their magical glasses. Retaliating upon innocents their grudges against a few bullies in their past. We could stand to be nicer to folks who don’t fit in, and at the same time not hand them metaphorical and genuine ammunition. This guy missed his opportunity to become a social media crusader and blame all his difficulties on whites.
Wow, thanks to Jim goad for providing us with the straight dope on this matter! Huh, straight dope, I just realized that’s an oxymoron, or is it a paradox?
Can’t help but notice that, so far, no one has called the killer a brown supremacist.
These shooters only think of themselves and never consider what the rest of us will have to endure when shitheads in politics, entertainment and TV “news” talk about it.
The horror.
What soulless knee-jerk rhetoric-reciter and ever-strategizing cold-blooded political piranha Barack Obama had to say about it in clipped, avuncular tones really takes the cake. The half-baked cake.
Search it at your own risk.
It’s the entertainers who tend to give us: “I care so much more about murdered children than everyone else and I’m furious about it! Can we get a close-up of me caring?”
It’s a quandary: How to pin this one on racist global warming?
Obama probably twatted that tweet about “For crying out loud, people, let’s not forget career criminal George Floyd amid all this boo hoo-ing over some dead kiddies” from Richard Branson’s private island where the only other black people were Toots And The Maytals.
All were gun controls psyops! Biden did the same thing, beginning in Obama’s second term. Biden has two mandates from the power elites: make whites a minority in America, and take away the right of whites to own firearms.
The quiet type. I am reminded of a comedian who once said that it’s the mosquitoes that don’t buzz that will bite you. So if you hear buzzing, don’t worry. It’s when you don’t hear buzzing, watch out!
This guy seemed to be a bit of both, what with his self harm and other weird antics.
I suspect this was a bit of a copycat killing, following so closely the Buffalo tragedy. Because of this, my anger of the memoryholing of Waukesha is abating a little.
The bullying made him an angry outcast. But why lash out at little kids instead of classmates, one can cut the Columbine dorks some slack given their appropriately chosen targets.
99% of these mass shooters are alienated from their biological father. Can this be fixed? What of the meds these kids are given? What about the social media poison which increases anxiety and alienation?
Other solutions that would reduce likelihood of this happening and or body count, at least: 1. bring back to schools: shooting clubs, archery, boxing, workshop, other ways for young men to release excess energy 2. Lock school doors (a stranger should not be able to get into an elementary school so easily; of course this solution will push the shooters to high schools exclusively where they easily blend in) 3. Arm teachers, which I think is the best solution on its own merits.
This clearly wasn’t political or racially motivated. It doesn’t make the act any less heinous just because our elites can’t easily make political hay out of it, besides mental adolescent skateboarding political douchebags crashing press conferences to scold their opponents.
Was Richard Ramirez reincarnated into globohomo?
Ramos ended up killing two little white girls, so he can go to hell. Otherwise, this is not the business of white people (even though it is a surprisingly Republican town), which I think henceforth will be the new reaction to these events gradually becoming more regional (especially because of runaway nonwhite violence + reflexive radio silence, with normie Republicans decrying the memory-holed hypocrisy) rather than the usual ‘flag at half-staff’ since that has become its normal position more days than not.
There is a definite media fail-safe where they react with calls for gun control when the gunman is nonwhite, but call for white privilege/supremacy/incel/misogyny control when the gunman is white (or can be made to appear white like George Zimmerman, which they also did whiten the brownie Ramos just in case).
There is a recording of a prescient black guy calling into Howard Stern the day after Columbine trying to make the connection of white males to the handful of school shootings all the way back then, which was ahead of its time because the media was too busy blaming Marilyn Manson, video games and gothic (synonymous with ‘gay’ at the time) subculture rather than white males for that unprecedented event, especially since one gunman was Jewish and both were anti-Christian back when Colorado was mostly evangelical Republican.
But late 1990s demographics were still not Obama era demographics, so it made no sense to indict whiteness just yet because there was also a delicate calculus to not spur a rightist crusade against Judaism at a time when a bipartisan ‘Judeo-Christian’ neoconservatism was also finally culminating (Kosovo/Iraq Liberation Act/East Africa Embassy Bombings as a prequel to 9/11 and a media masterstroke deflection from Monica Lewinsky) in a decade marred by nonpartisan rightist/white nationalist militias vs bipartisan anti-white government violence (Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City etc).
It appears that only after a tumultuous 2012 of high-profile shootings (Aurora, Sikh Temple, Javon Belcher, Sandy Hook etc) did the media develop this pincer strategy on how to handle the hysteria of mass-murder depending on the race of the gunman/victims. Sandy Hook (who knows what actually happened) seemed to signal a turning point when Piers Morgan, Michael Moore, Bob Costas and so many other celebrities all had a tweet tailored for the next massacre before it happened, which also happened to coincide with and fuel the Alex Jonesification of the right wing when every massacre was automatically suspected of being a government-media ‘false flag’ to ‘take the guns’ (implicitly from law-abiding whites, but not from nonwhite criminals).
So that is why there is no indictment of the obvious virginity of Ramos. No accusations of pedophilia (anti-white slur) as with Adam Lanza, which the media had originally even tried to own as a Blue States activist protesting the ‘school-to-prison-pipeline,’ as they had not yet developed a coherent blueprint to best capitalize on the media sensationalism during the short-lived Wild West of the internet.
I think that all societies — even self-contained, racially and linguistically homogeneous societies near the Mexican border — can go too far with the bullying.
I’ll make a slight alteration to this:
I think that all societies, and especially, self-contained, racially and linguistically homogeneous societies near the Mexican border — can go too far with the bullying.
Hispanic (esp Mexican of which I know about) culture is ruthlessly “bullyish.” There is nothing restrained or quaint about Mexican culture’s tendency to fiercely shittalk. If you grow up in a trad Mexican household, you’ll pretty much learn from a young age to take it and if you’re smart, to give it back. There is nothing Woke or touchy-feely about Mexicans, and I think Salvador succumbed to it.
I figure it probably was a copycat crime, following all the other stuff that’s been happening. He thought he had it bad before, but he’ll spend the last of his days in prison. We’d probably see a lot less of this stuff if somehow we could put a “damnatio memoriae” on anyone who goes postal.
This one’s dead, Beau.
He will spend the rest of eternity in a prison not of this world.
This is just a horrible story all the way around, but I’m glad Goad has explained a little more of the boy’s sad problems, because I had to turn the TV off immediately after hearing the body count and the fact that they were all young children killed point blank. I’ve kept the news off for 2 days and only now have allowed this story here to enter my psyche. Parents and teachers and other school personnel have to be more tuned-in to overly quiet and withdrawn students, and some people probably shouldn’t be parents, but we can’t be tuned into every problem in the world. This shooting comes in the midst of an equally horrid war in Ukraine, where families’ entire livelihood and coherence is being obliterated, as in any war. After 3 months of following that war, in a 97% White country being decimated by the next country over, nearly as White, for some reason this shooting in Texas was simply the last straw. But thanks to the author here, we can now see a gleam of healing and find a thread we can follow to maybe reach out to these kinds of kids, and withdrawn people of all ages in our midst.
I’ve always been a loner as well, but I’ve been blessed with an in-born love of art, classical music, nature and animals, which has allowed me to get through hard times. For instance, just as I’ve been writing this, the radio has blessedly presented me with Maurice Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G Major”, which is one of the loveliest and most calming of all compositions. Look it up on the internet and treat yourself.
Thanks, Ms. O. I did.
The Columbine shooters weren’t some meek bullying victims, they weren’t shy, and they were quite socially integrated; although Harris had a bit of a rep sheet.
What they were is a megalomaniacal psychopath and his anti-social sidekick feeding his narcissism. They had no special animosity towards their colleagues, just wanted to go on in history by causing severe mayhem. Their original plan called for a whole lot more victims, including among the police, first responders, and the media.
This misconception that was basically slapped on them with no supporting evidence early on really needs to die.
School shootings really are Black Swan events…notable because they are actually so rare. More recently, these shootings have been weaponized by the Regime for political (anti-White) purposes as we have seen with the case of Peyton Gendron.
The political reaction will likely lead to more government programs designed to prevent similar from happening again. Generalizing from exceptional cases will dump tons of resources into efforts which may forestall a similar Black Swan mass shooting. But those resources will be diverted away from routine law enforcement which means an explosion in crime on other fronts.
Let’s note that American blacks perpetrate random shootings waaaaay out of proportion to their numbers. Look at the drivebys and gangbanging, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (if they have not been vaporized). The mainstream media covers up these shootings with all sorts of euphemisms (“gun violence,” “streets gone wrong,” “marginalized teens”). And we need not comment on how the Regime media relegated the Waukesha killings to the memory hole.
It’s not just the shootings. There is considerable violence across inner city schools, including assaults on both students and teachers. American Renaissance routinely runs pieces on classrooms from hell. And there are the games like Knockout King and Polar Bear Punching. The late great Colin Flaherty well documented the mayhem.
This criminal violence has been allowed to escalate beyond any sanity by disproportionate impact polices (blacks can not be disciplined out of proportion to their numbers), criminal justice reform (releasing convicts from prison), defunding the police, and turning a blind eye to the looting of business districts.
Perhaps the cops who once might have charged into that school and taken down the shooter were thinking, “Hey, I don’t want to be smeared as having killed an oppressed marginalized vulnerable person of color. I got my pension and my family to think about and where will they be if I am sitting in jail cell.”
Polite society wants the police to take a knee before criminal thugs? Well, this paid off in a southwest Texas school.
All part of the ongoing disintegration of American civilization.
Plan accordingly.
“Did Ramos do this because everyone picked on him, or did everyone pick on him because they sensed he’s the type that would do something like this”
Exactly what I am wondering.
I know they’re going with the “we need sensible gun control laws” tack. They never let a crisis go to waste. But with the exception of Tucker Carlson last week, we never hear about the pharmaceuticals these kids are gobbling before their crazed beserker moment.
Biden and all the other usual suspects love to pretend that the “gun lobby” is some King-Kong gorilla that must be stopped before the next crazed lunatic incident happens (probably sometime next week). What about Big Pharma, which spends vastly more on lobbying of Congress than the NRA could ever hope to match?
Prozac and Ritalin were introduced in the late 1980s. Is it a complete coincidence that school shootings became a recurring news sensation shortly after that? It’s certainly worth looking into, but with the amounts of money sloshing around Congress, it’s worth even more to some people to not look into.
Allahu Akbar!
Great piece, as ever. The word ‘Maricon’ has a great and malevolent power in Latin America. I called some guy who was ragging me in a bar here in Costa Rica maricon and he pulled a hunting knife on me. I won’t be using it again in a hurry. I would be interested to hear your second Amendment views. It is so alien to Brits.
In ancient Scandinavia, implying that someone is a homosexual was grounds for holmgang – a duel to the death.
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