In the best case scenario, Discord leaker Jack Teixeira is a conspiracy theorist who pillaged the nation’s secrets in a bid to confirm his paranoid antigovernment hunches. 

Either that, or he was one bad breakup away from becoming a mass shooter. 

Regardless, Teixeira remains a perfect mascot for Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allies on the far right. 

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” the Republican insurrectionist and notorious conspiracy theorist tweeted after Teixeira was arrested on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act. 

Greene approves of Teixeira’s because she thinks he helped Russia, and probably because she appreciates the malevolent chaotic energy it takes to betray your country for internet clout.

Back when he still had a job at Fox News, Tucker Carlson painted Teixeira as a noble whistleblower exposing the crimes of the Washington establishment, despite the fact that Teixeira had no intention of publicizing the documents outside his small circle of newly post-pubescent Discord bros. 

In its April 26 motion for pretrial detention, the government noted that Teixiera searched a classified database for keywords linked to mass shootings such as “Uvalde” and “Mandalay Bay” as well as for conspiracy topics like “Ruby Ridge.” 

The government suggested that Teixiera might have been searching for mass shootings because he believed the US had advance knowledge of the massacres, a widespread belief among antigovernment conspiracists. 

Or he may have been planning a mass shooting of his own. Or both. Plenty of mass shooters are also conspiracy theorists. 

The government’s motion revealed that Teixeira was suspended from high school in 2018 after a classmate overhead him talking about “weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial attacks.” The adults around him were so alarmed by his words that they were memorialized in a police report. 

For two years, his local police department refused to grant him a firearms identification card because of his record. The local cops only relented after Teixeria wrote to say that he deserved a card, despite what he’d said at school, because he now held a position of trust with the US government. 

Joining the military did not help Teixeira outgrow his fixation with mass shooters. In late 2022, Teixeira announced online that he wanted to “kill a [expletive] ton of people” in order to “cull the weak-minded.” 

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This wasn’t a passing fancy. 

Teixeira sought advice on the best rifle to use to make an SUV or a minivan into a mobile assassination platform for use in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.” 

With chilling specificity, he indicated that he wanted to pinpoint a target on a sidewalk or porch. Teixeira was still banging on about “mobile gun trucks” and “assassination vehicles” in the weeks before his arrest.  

Concerns about Teixeira’s capacity for violence followed him into real life. One of Teixeira’s former colleagues told the FBI that he believed that “he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot anyone in the workplace.” 

The new revelations put an even darker spin on a video that shows Teixeira yelling antisemitic and racist slurs before emptying a large rifle into a target. 

The government’s exhibits reveal that Teixeria slept in a camouflage-covered grotto festooned with ghillie netting. Teixeira decorated his room with human-shaped targets full of bullet holes and what appears to be a pennant bearing an emblem of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Investigators found multiple AR-style weapons, a gas mask and a bazooka. A pretrial detention report estimated Teixiera’s net worth at $19,000, half of which was guns. 

Of course Marjorie Taylor Greene admires the kid. 

During her first campaign, Greene posted a graphic of herself with an assault rifle juxtaposed against a photo of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad, which was taken down for violating Facebook’s terms of service. 

Greene went on to become a key player in Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election. She later boasted that if she had been in charge, the mob would have been armed.

Greene approves of Teixeira’s because she thinks he helped Russia, and probably because she appreciates the malevolent chaotic energy it takes to betray your country for internet clout.

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