Gov. Abbott Sent Anti-Immigrant Letter Day Before El Paso Tragedy

If we're going to DEFEND Texas, we'll need to take matters into our own hands.

This is the opening line of a letter sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott the day before a gunman walked into a Wal-Mart in El Paso and killed 22 people, injuring another 24.

Governor Abbott goes on to blame Democrats and gives numbers like:

Between October and May, there were 593,507 apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. In just three weeks in June, 45,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing the Mexican border in to Texas!

I'm not sure if those facts are actual facts, but that's not the focus here. Governor Abbott puts towards the bottom of the letter:

Doing nothing will only lead to disaster for Texas, both economically and politically. Securing our border should be should be the federal government's job, but there is clearly a crisis at our southern border -- a crisis that Congress refuses to fix.

I live in the border city of El Paso and the only crisis that I can even think of is a madman walking into a Wal-Mart with a military style weapon and killing 22 people, plus injuring 24 others.

Let's take a look at Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. How did he react to the shooting in El Paso? He blamed mental health and video games. He said on Fox & Friends:

How long are we going to ignore — at the federal level particularly — where they can do something about the video game industry? In this manifesto that we believe is from the shooter, this manifesto where he talks about living out his super soldier fantasy on Call of Duty. We know the video game industry is bigger than the movie and music industry combined.

No, it's not video games. It's been proven time and time again that video games DO NOT cause violence.

I'll give you mental health is an issue. But we need to be able to look at the hate filled rhetoric as a part of the problem. Just take a look at the murderer's manifesto that said his attack was a:

...response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Take one part mental issues, one part easy access to guns, and one part "crisis on the border" rhetoric vilifying good people, and you have a recipe for what happened in El Paso on August 3rd, 2019.

Look, I know that Governor Abbott wasn't writing this letter with the intentions of violence and murder. But his intentions do not change the end result. It is time to put an end to this vote grabbing, hate filled rhetoric.