Facticity Patterns in Eco-racist Discourse: Appraising the El Paso Shooting

In a subtle attempt to fortify territorial boundaries, the rise of White nationalism and far-right politics worldwide has recently brought to the fore the dangerous conflation of immigration and ecological crisis at the basis of eco-racist discourses fuelling several conspiracy theories. These, in turn, have led to a series of terrorist attacks, including the mass shooting among the Hispanic community which took place in El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019 by Patrick Crusius. Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines eco-racism, appraisal theory, and facticity in linguistic analysis, this article aims to analyse Crusius’s manifesto – “The Inconvenient Truth” – to highlight the linguistic strategies he deploys to construct his discourse as factual in order to influence readers’ convictions. The analysis intends to increase awareness about the implications of the co-articulation of anti-ecological and racist discourses and eventually aid their dismantling.