a woman, and behaving “erratically.”
On July 23, he showed up ten minutes late for the 7:10 showing of Trainwreck and took a seat in the second-to-last row. He had a .40-caliber handgun in his pants pocket and two ten-round magazines. About ten minutes after he had arrived, he stood, pulled the gun from his pocket, and shot the two people sitting directly in front of him. Then he began walking down the stairway aisle, shooting people in their seats and as they fled. He reloaded once, firing in all at least thirteen rounds.
When the shooting subsided, Houser attempted to return to his car by mingling with panicked patrons. But then he himself panicked when police arrived with lights and sirens blazing, and he ran back inside, firing again randomly at patrons as he did so. Finally he stopped, put the gun in his mouth, and fired a last shot.
Houser killed two women and wounded nine people. The injuries ranged in severity from light to life-altering, and the victims ranged in age from teenagers to women and men in their sixties. One of the victims suffered four gunshot wounds.
The news of the mass shooting hit the networks that night. Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, anchoring the news desk that evening, pondered the breaking story: “Any reason to believe there might be a connection to ISIS, or radical Islam, or terror as we understand it in this country?”
When investigators got to Houser’s Motel 6 room, they found wigs and dresses and makeup for disguises. It looked as though he had planned to escape.
They also found his journal. It didn’t explain precisely why he decided to target a theater showing Trainwreck, but the general direction of his thinking was easy to discern. It isn’t hard to guess why he chose a theater showing that movie as a “soft target,” since he likely figured the audience would be full of liberals and women of questionable moral values.
Investigators also noted that Houser had penned some thoughts on Dylann Roof, whom in one note he called “good but green.”
“Had Dylan Roof reached political maturity he would have seen the word is not nigger, but liberal,” Houser wrote, an eerie echo of Adkisson’s views. “But thank you for the wake up call Dylann.”
Ladies and Gentlemen: In American public life there is an alternative dimension, a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia. Welcome to Alternative America—Alt-America, for short.
Alt-America is an alternative universe that has a powerful resemblance to our own, except that it’s a completely different America, the nation its residents have concocted and reconfigured in their imaginations. It is not the America where the rest of us live. In this other America, suppositions take the place of facts, and conspiracy theories become concrete realities. Its citizens live alongside us in our universe, but their perception of that universe places them in a different world altogether, one scarcely recognizable to those outside it.
In Alt-America:
•Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya who conspired with a global elite and terrorist radicals to impose sharia law on America.
•Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most mainstream politicians are simultaneously the corrupt pawns of a nefarious New World Order (NWO) that seeks to impose a global government that will turn the world’s population into their slaves.
•Global climate change is a hoax concocted by the NWO and environmentalist elites who want to impose massive regulatory regimes on businesses and force ordinary Americans out of public lands.
•These same global elites want to gut the Second Amendment so that Americans’ guns can be confiscated and the populace disarmed, all in the name of public safety, but really for the purpose of imposing its tyrannical dictatorship.
•The current American government is actually an illegal and unconstitutional entity that seized control of the United States in the 1930s and, through its corrupt Federal Reserve Bank, controls the nation’s fiat currency for its own nefarious ends.
•Prejudice and oppression against white people now is a greater problem for the world than whatever bigotry minorities might face. White people are the primary targets of oppression by an elite that shames them with “political correctness” whenever they object to the rising tide of brown faces—especially foreign-language-speaking Muslims and Latinos—in their midst.
•Minorities, especially blacks and illegal immigrants, are busily sucking up taxpayer dollars through welfare programs while homeless veterans go hungry. Organizations like Black Lives Matter are just another chapter in minorities’ claims to victimhood, while their adherents shoulder no responsibility themselves.
•Illegal immigrants, especially Latinos, are part of a conspiracy by liberals and Democrats to overwhelm the country with welfare-dependent parasites who eagerly vote for the liberal agenda in order to sustain their lifestyle.
The longer you dwell in this universe, the more likely you are to absorb some of its more exotic beliefs, such as the theory that chemtrails left by jet airliners are actually part of a New World Order plot to slowly poison the populace or spread mind-control drugs, or that federal emergency-management plans are in reality a cover for a plot to begin rounding up Americans and forcing them into concentration camps.
Once Alt-Americans start to believe some of these kooky ideas, it becomes a simple matter to persuade them of the reality of other kooky ideas, new threats, new conspiracies against them and the nation. When Donald Trump informs his followers that there’s a massive media and establishment conspiracy to “rig the election” and deny him the presidency, they not only eagerly embrace the claim but begin talking about a “revolution” to overthrow or even assassinate Hillary Clinton.
Established facts supported by concrete real-world evidence are inconsequential to people inside the Alt-America universe—indeed, those facts are instead interpreted as further evidence of the conspiracy and its efforts to hide “the truth.” Never mind that President Obama is a practicing, churchgoing Christian who was born in Hawaii and has produced both versions of his birth certificate to prove that. And if he really is sympathetic to Islamic radicalism and the installment of sharia law, he certainly has an odd way of showing it, having ordered the killing of the Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, as well as the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) leaders Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Hafiz Sayed Khan.
Never mind that the New World Order conspiracy has long been recognized as the product of the fevered dreams of the extremist Patriot movement and John Birch Society elements of the American right that have been claiming since the 1950s that society is on the brink of mass roundups and enslavement that have never materialized—ideas that keep finding fresh life under new guises.
It doesn’t matter to Alt-Americans that a consensus of the world’s climate scientists agrees that global climate change is a reality that is already upon us, nor that the world’s ice caps and glaciers are measurably shrinking at an alarming rate, and that sea levels around the world have already begun rising, already begun inundating low-lying American states such as Louisiana.
You can try explaining to someone from this universe that, even though a number of liberals and Democrats have proposed minor regulatory measures in response to the epidemic of gun violence that costs 33,000 Americans their lives every year, no one has proposed any
