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THE TRUE CAUSE OF THIS LATEST ACT OF DOMESTIC TERROR

  • Writer: Gonzalo Santos
    Gonzalo Santos
  • Nov 30
  • 6 min read

It has become quite the habit for the Hater-in-Chief to smear all immigrants as violent criminals for the crimes of a few, and use it to justify the ongoing cruel, violent, illegal campaign of mass detentions and deportations we have been witnessing, and his callous shutting down of most refugee and other legal admissions programs - even reversing and nullifying all temporary legal statuses.


This sharply contrasts Trump's and his acolytes' ho-hum reflexive deflecting and avoiding any group stigmatizing & targeting when the mass shooter is a white U.S.-born male, as we have witnessed for years after so many school/parish/mall shootings - even after Trump's own harrowing survival from two would-be assassins... as long as they are white male Americans! (I’ve previously noted how quickly these two shooters were forgotten by the media and the Trump administration, as was the young white male killer of Charlie Kirk.)


In social psychology there’s a well-established “attribution theory” for this double standard, consistently attributing individual blame and purely external causes for bad behavior perpetrated by a high social status person - deemed “the exception to the rule” -, on the one hand, while rushing to attribute collective blame and internal group characteristics for the same bad behavior perpetrated by any low social status person - deemed their “nature.” 


White male mass shooters in the United States are deemed radicalized “lone wolves” or mentally “deranged individuals” who “break down” due to the stress caused for some reason - work-related, mental, etc. They do not represent white males in general, their violent acts are solely responded with collective “thoughts and prayers” for the innocent victims - never any proposed campaign against white males as a whole - or even passage of sensible gun control, social reintegration, or mental health laws.


But in dealing with immigrant-caused American fatalities of any kind - even those caused by accidentally-discharged guns - we witness over and over again strident calls for draconian policies and campaigns stigmatizing and targeting entire immigrant communities, as we saw in 2017 with the House passage of the “Kate’s Law” bill (failed in the Senate), the “Laken Riley Act” signed into law this January, and President Trump’s rabid response to the shooting of the two National Guard members in D.C. by an Afghan immigrant this last week, where he’s now calling for revoking all Afghan asylum permits and green cards, and launching a massive denaturalization and deportation campaign of foreign-born U.S. citizens, green card-holders, or temporary legal status immigrants from targeted countries.


As of November 30, 2025, there have been 380 mass shootings in the US just this year, more than one a day, resulting in 315 deaths and over 1,600 injuries. During the same period, approximately 13,424 gun-related deaths occurred due to homicide, murder, and unintentional incidents in the United States (suicides account for nearly 6 in 10 U.S. gun deaths). 


Extremely few gun deaths are attributed to immigrants. The U.S.-born-on-U.S.-born American carnage continues unabated, and so, maliciously and incongruently, are the restrictionist, punitive, and draconian mass detention and deportation campaigns of the last 35 years against the immigrants who are falsely blamed for it, as they are relentlessly labelled and treated by media charlatans and political opportunists of both major parties - none more than Trump and his acolytes - as “violent criminals” and “terrorists,” though time and again they have been shown to be proportionally much less violent prone than the U.S.-born population.


Turning to the D.C. shooting of the two National Guard members, a much more plausible explanation of what happened and a very worrisome aspect of the Afghan shooter involved is the revelation that he had previously been recruited, trained, and deployed in a death squad in the U.S.-Afghanistan war, one of many CIA-backed Afghan paramilitary teams known as the “Zero Units.” 


These units carried out extrajudicial killings during the so-called "counterinsurgency" operations. This 29-year-old man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was reported by his family and friends to be suffering from acute mental issues that directly resulted from what he did and saw as a murderous mercenary for the U.S. That would amply explain to anyone not wearing MAGA blinders why this particular Afghan asylee would become unstable and deranged enough to cross the country and ambush and shoot the two National Guard members.


But apparently, neither the immigration authorities who initially vetted and admitted him into the U.S. in 2021 at the end of the Biden administration, nor the immigration authorities who vetted him and granted him asylum this last April during the second Trump administration, had any qualms about it, nor did it triggered among them any red flags of concern.


Why is that? 


Well, it is mainly because ever since the Cold War era the U.S. has been routinely and preferentially admitting these sort of C.I.A.-recruited, trained & sponsored "counterinsurgency" death-squad murders and torturers -- from Laos and Vietnam, Brazil and Bolivia, Cuba in the 1960s and 70s, Guatemala and El Salvador, and Contras from Nicaragua in the 1980s and 90s, and after 9/11, from all the war zones in the so-called "Global War on Terrorism" - Iraq, Afghanistan, all over the Middle East and Africa. 


That is, the preferential no-questions-asked admission of thousands of these murderous, highly dangerous men working for the C.I.A. was routinized decades ago, and literally thousands of them now live among us in the United States. BTW, so are their U.S. trainers!


Mostly untreated for their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), it was entirely predictable one or more of them would turn against their sponsoring country, the U.S., and in particular against its armed forces and law enforcement officers. The truly startling fact is how few such cases have actually occurred, not that it happened at all. 


It's a wake up call not about war refugee admissions in general, who are highly vetted every step of the way, but admitting the "worse of the worse" through a decades-old covert and unaccountable C.I.A. fast-track, to put it in current DHS secretary Kristi Noem's and border zar Tom Homan's lingo - this time for real.


This inconvenient but accurate explanation is not meant to whip up, nor should it arose, hate and hysteria against all war refugees, or to smear in any way the overwhelming majority of the refugees and asylum-seekers admitted into the United States and other countries, who have been and are bona fide, innocent civilian victims of war and famine and other forms of heinous persecution, protected by international law and who have never committed any crimes in their homelands or in the countries that welcome them.


A last point needs to be made as well. This troublesome issue of war combatants, overt and covert, returning to the U.S. with untreated PTSD is also true of thousands of veterans of the U.S. armed forces and intelligence agencies who came back haunted and deeply disturbed by the crimes they witnessed and/or participated in, and as such are a danger to themselves and others. I once had a brother-in-law who fought in Vietnam who came back mentally damaged (he committed suicide), and today I have a nephew deeply affected by his tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.


Many of our veterans end up hurting themselves and need help. A few have engaged in domestic terrorism, as we have repeatedly witnessed -- the 1995 Oklahoma bombing by ex-Army soldier Timothy McVeigh being the most notorious and deadly case. Since 9/11, at least 15 confirmed mass shootings and targeted attacks on police or military personnel have been perpetrated by U.S. military veterans. These attacks have killed 128 people and wounded nearly 200 more. Veterans make up about 7% of the adult population—but they account for 26% of mass shooters. 


Among the most violent Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists and many of those in today’s violent vigilante groups are known veterans. It should therefore not surprise us that many, if not most, of the masked, unmarked ICE thugs unleashed by Trump/Noem/Homan and wreaking havoc on the streets of America today are former servicemen. This imperialist country is not only addicted to violence abroad, but as a consequence is deeply afflicted when it brings the war back home as well.


And yet, nobody is calling for persecuting all veterans for the violent crimes of some of the most damaged ones. Nobody should be calling on - or countenancing - the persecution of all refugee Afghans, or any other refugee populations productively settled and peaceably living among us, for the crimes of a few damaged ones recruited by us, either.


And everybody should realize that endlessly making war and committing war crimes abroad inevitably leads to heinous crimes at home - self-inflicted and otherwise. 


It's high time we as a world power stop launching and sponsoring wars, committing or enabling war crimes abroad, and leaving untreated unstable, damaged men to roam the land armed to the teeth at home. Instead, let's help the veterans heal. Let's help the non-violent refugees of our sponsored wars come, settle, and heal. Let’s stop covertly recruiting mercenary assassins, too. 


Let's stop making war and start building peace!


Deal with it, America! Evolve! Heal thyself and help heal the world!





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Pan American Unity by Diego Rivera, 1940

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