'According to certified stuff'

The cases of a far-right white shooter and a random immigrant from El Salvador perfectly encapsulate the double standard of American life.

Apr 20, 2025

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Above: A photo from Trump’s Truth Social post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Below: The FSU shooter.

I’ve been head-down on a big project about Black land loss in coastal Georgia, a story that’s in the works for the Guardian. Meanwhile, I’m still keeping an eye on DOGE, Social Security, immigration, and many other matters key to holding the Trump regime accountable. If you want to support my work, the best way to do so is through a paid subscription or buy dropping a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

Now, on to the news…

***

I had that feeling when I saw the headlines on Thursday morning. It used to be my full-time job that whenever something terrible would happen — like the shooting at Florida State University that left two dead and six wounded last week — I would run, drive or fly toward it. The feeling I had was that I knew what came next: far-right extremist views of another white American killer.

I still occasionally cover tragedy in real-time, although I’m lucky not to have to cover it on a constant basis — as I have for much of the last decade. If I wasn’t that lucky, by mid-morning Thursday I would have been where a lot of other reporters were, waist deep in court records and the online paper trail left behind by the shooter, Phoenix Ikner. I’d be calling up his classmates, too, and learning — just like reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere learned — that Ikner was apparently a proponent of the ideology of the American right.

For the last decade in which I have made my living chasing American violence and chaos, I have watched that ideology morph into more extreme forms.

“He repeatedly espoused white supremacist, alt-right views to the point where people were uncomfortable, and we had to ask him to leave,” one classmate told the Times.

The same classmate said Ikner was against Rosa Parks, which may be incredible for some people to read but for those of us who pay attention the white supremacy-laden revisionist history of the online right, this is a position that’s not surprising for someone of Ikner’s age and apparent political beliefs. But the Times and many other publications have much more:

“He strongly implied that Black people were ruining his neighborhood,” the Times reports. “He also said Joe Biden was an illegitimate president.”

The two men that Ikner killed are Tiru Chabba and Robert Morales, who join the list of non-white Americans killed by a white American’s bullets.

***

While Ikner’s motives are, for the moment, unclear, his political leanings and background are rightfully being looked at in the absence of more information from law enforcement about the why. Without the ability or willingness to speak for himself, it’s the press’ job to try to figure out more about Ikner and why he did what he did.

The same goes for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is unable to speak for himself from wherever he’s being held in El Salvador. But because this is America, one of these men gets the benefit of the doubt — one of these men is innocent until proven guilty, as we like to say — and the other has been given little chance to defend himself at all. Instead, the Trump administration has mobilized the full force of the U.S. government to go after a single man — Garcia — for what increasingly looks like a publicity stunt gone wrong. Donald Trump and his team of sad, broken people wanted to look tough by sending a bunch of bad guys to a prison in El Salvador, but they ended up sending a bunch of people who may or may not even be criminals, let alone the “terrorists” the Trump regime is portraying them as.

This includes Garcia, whose criminal history and alleged involvement with MS-13 appears to come down to the word of an informant and a disgraced cop who was ousted from his job after sharing confidential investigative information with a sex worker. Weeks after Garcia was deported for allegedly being a really bad guy, no less than the Attorney General of the United States herself is releasing more information about Garcia’s alleged crimes, which include getting pulled over with eight people in the car.

More Doom reporting on right-wing extremism

What right-wing media is trying to portray as human trafficking might also be called immigrants traveling together on the cheap from one state to another under the promise of construction work. Trump himself has also gotten involved in the attempts to portray Garcia as a bad guy, saying that “according to certified stuff” from parties unnamed, Trump has the inside scoop that Garcia was a bad dude. The president has also shared images of Garcia’s tattoos that he says are code for “MS-13.”

Meanwhile, turn on Fox News any hour of the day and you’re bound to find a photo of Garcia alongside someone discussing how he’s a really, really bad guy. A lot of times, the person discussing Garcia’s terroristic background that doesn’t seem to actually exist looks something like this.

That’s one of the Fox News reporters who has been covering both the Garcia and Ikner cases. In the former, he has written up the latest Trump comments which in a normal world would amount to defamation against Garcia. In the latter, Norman has written one story that fails to mention the apparent far-right beliefs that America’s latest white mass shooter held as his motive “remains a mystery.” In his second story in Ikner, Norman humanized the shooter, his stepmother, and the “law enforcement community” that Ikner and his stepmother, a sheriff’s deputy, were part of. It’s a “rough time” for that community, Norman reports the sheriff’s office as saying.

At press time, Norman was apparently unable to reach the families of Chabba and Morales to see how they’re holding up. I reached out to Norman to ask him about his framing of the Ikner case. No response as of press time here.

***

P.S. Longtime readers of mine might remember a story from just before the pandemic that I wrote about foreign lucha libre fighters in Mexico. The story, for Inside Hook, focused on a wrestler named Broderick Shepherd who performed under the stage name Australian Suicide. Broderick was an exceptional young man who was dedicated to his craft. He truly loved his work — and his fans loved him. Broderick was lucha through and through. He lived the life of a lucha fighter from the moment he woke up until he went to bed each day. That life can be hard. Broderick passed last month at the age of 32 from a heart attack. He will be sorely missed by the lucha community in Mexico City, his wife, the female lucha fighter Vanilla Vargas, and their young child. I’m grateful to have known him briefly, and for the opportunity to step into his world.

On another note, I recommend Declan Walsh’s latest report from Sudan, where the Trump administration’s cutting off of aid is resulting in even worse famine and desperation than was already occurring there. This of course represents a moral failure on the part of Americans who support these efforts. Innocent men, women and children are now dying as a result of the Trump administration’s supposed America First policies — policies that are rooted in the selfishness, greed and self-centeredness of far too many Americans. I think it’s important to not look away from the consequences of our actions.

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