The Austin mass shooting just got a whole lot worse. Investigators have now confirmed that the gunman, 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne, was wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie over an Iranian flag t-shirt when he opened fire on a crowd of innocent people on Sixth Street. They also found an Iranian flag and photos of Iranian regime leaders inside his home.
Seriously? An Islamist shoots up a bar in Texas wearing what amounts to a terrorist uniform and the FBI is still calling it a “potential” nexus to terrorism. Potential? The guy was dressed like a jihadi Halloween costume. What more do you need — a notarized letter from the Ayatollah?
Oh wait. The Ayatollah is dead. The US and Israel killed Khamenei in a massive military strike just hours before this guy loaded up his pistol and his rifle and drove around the block at Buford’s bar looking for targets. But we’re told there’s no confirmed connection yet. (Somewhere, an FBI analyst is filling out the world’s most pointless paperwork.)
Pay attention to the timeline here, because it tells you everything. On Saturday, American and Israeli forces launched a devastating strike on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Within hours, a Senegalese-born naturalized citizen in Austin, Texas put on his “Property of Allah” hoodie, grabbed an Iranian flag shirt, strapped up, and went hunting for Americans to kill.
When cops searched Diagne’s car, they found a Quran. When they searched his apartment, they found an Iranian flag and photographs of Iranian regime leaders. The man was a one-man shrine to the Islamic Republic. But please, tell us more about his “prior mental health issues.” We’re all ears.
That’s the game, by the way. That’s the play that gets run every single time. Radical Islamist commits an act of obvious terrorism, and within 24 hours, the “mental health” excuse gets rolled out like clockwork. The media finds a neighbor who says he “kept to himself” and a therapist who says he had “episodes.” Case closed. Nothing to see here. Definitely not terrorism.
Three people are dead now. A third victim, 30-year-old Jorge Pederson, died Monday after fighting for his life. He joins 19-year-old Ryder Harrington, a Texas Tech student, and Savitha Shanmugasundaram, a 21-year-old UT Austin student. Kids. College kids out having a Saturday night and now they’re gone because a radicalized jihadist was allowed to waltz into this country, collect citizenship, and carry out an attack on American soil.
We covered Diagne’s immigration story in our first piece on this shooting. He came in on a tourist visa in 2000, got a green card through marriage in 2006, and became a citizen in 2013. The “vetting process” that we’re all supposed to worship like a golden calf flagged exactly nothing. He wasn’t on the FBI’s radar. He wasn’t on Austin PD’s radar. Nobody had a clue.
And now three families are burying their kids.
Governor Greg Abbott, to his credit, isn’t playing the “let’s wait for more information” game. He ordered the Texas Military Department to activate patrols to protect communities and critical infrastructure. He warned that Texas will respond aggressively to anyone “using the current conflict in the Middle East to threaten Texans.” That’s the kind of response you’d expect from a governor who isn’t trying to win a press award.
(Compare that to how a Democrat governor would handle this. Gavin Newsom would have held a press conference about gun control and then blamed climate change somehow.)
Here’s what the media will never say out loud: we are at war with Iran. We killed their supreme leader. And within hours, an Iranian regime fanboy shot up a bar full of Americans. If this exact scenario happened in reverse — if an American killed Iranian civilians the day after Iran killed an American leader — every news anchor on earth would call it retaliation. But because this one makes the “immigration system works” crowd look stupid, we get “potential nexus” and “mental health.”
The FBI says they’re reviewing “thousands of hours of video” and interviewing witnesses. That’s nice. Here’s a suggestion for the investigation: maybe start with the giant Iranian flag in his living room and the photos of dead mullahs on his wall. Just a thought.
We said in our first piece on this story that we’d find out more about Diagne’s connections and that it would be worse than what we already knew. Wish we’d been wrong on that one. We weren’t.
President Trump has been briefed. We don’t know yet what action the White House plans to take. But here’s a prediction: this story is going to get even uglier before it gets better. There will be more details about this man’s radicalization, and every single one of them will make the people who told us “the system works” look like fools.
Three dead Americans. A terrorist in a “Property of Allah” hoodie. And an FBI that still can’t bring itself to say the word.
