Alleged Subway Shooter's Videos Reveal A Black Man Gripped By Far-Right Extremism
Frank James, the 62-year-old man now under arrest for Tuesday’s mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train, posted a lot of videos to YouTube and Facebook—over 450 of them, more than the number of subscribers he had (429). Mostly using the handle prophetoftruth88, these videos all featured him rambling angrily about a range of political topics, most of them racial in nature.
His YouTube account, now deleted, offered a kind of chronology of his descent into far-right extremism: James constantly disparaged other Black people, calling them “cattle” and “domesticated animals” whose intended role in white society was to be a slave; he regularly advocated setting up a separate “homeland” for nonwhite Americans. And he talked a lot about death, warning that “it’s gonna take a lot more death … for us to get the picture about how fucked-up we really are.”
Authorities say James set off smoke grenades aboard a subway at the 36th Street station in the Sunset Park neighborhood and opened fire with a handgun, reeling off 33 rounds before exiting the train with other passengers while wearing a gas mask. Ten people were shot, five of them suffering critical injuries, none of them life-threatening; another 19 people were injured while fleeing.