URGENT NEWS: MASS SHOOTING IN DAYTON, OHIO, LAST SATURDAY NIGHT. (This may not be news to you, but I watch MSNBC, so I only found out about the Dayton massacre yesterday.)
There have been two horrific shootings recently, but our media is only focusing on one – the one in El Paso, Texas – because the shooter, Patrick Crusius, released a “manifesto” containing some of the same arguments Trump has made about illegal immigration.
Crusius began, “This attack is in response to the Spanish invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from the cultural and ethnic exchange caused by the invasion.”
Wait a minute! Didn’t Trump operate the word “invasion” to describe our wide open border? Well, that makes him a co-conspirator in white supremacist carnage!
Of course, if we believe the part of Crusius’s manifesto that talks about “invasion,” I don’t know why we shouldn’t believe the part where he says his ideas have nothing to do with Trump — or the part where he denies he’s a “white supremacist.”
But those are the rules. The white supremacist who committed mass murder in El Paso made arguments that were “similar” to those made by President Trump — and ignored the avowed socialist and Elizabeth Warren supporter who committed a mass shooting in Dayton later that day.
The search has begun for anyone who has ever used a word starting with “i” in reference to illegal immigration.
(What about the “British Invasion”? Do we now owe reparations to the Rolling Stones, too? Apparently a perfectly good word, appropriate in a million other contexts, suddenly becomes “racist” when applied to Latinos.)
According to the Trump hysteria, if a terrorist cites X as a reason for an attack, then 1) that is conclusive proof that X is false; and 2) anyone who agrees with X is providing “material support” to terrorists.
So I would probably get in trouble if I said, “The El Paso shooting was a wake-up call, a moment of reckoning for politicians’ broken immigration promises and the hate backlash it sparked.”
This is a paraphrase of Michael Ignatieff’s words in The New York Times Magazine in 2003 regarding the American empire’s provocations of the 9/11 terrorists.
How about this:
“It is not just Patrick Crusius who feels this anger and resentment. There is widespread bitterness towards our politicians across the country, even among the pragmatic and educated who may sincerely condemn recent atrocities… but who remain outraged by the way the government is failing to secure our border.”
This is a paraphrase of what the writer Karen Armstrong wrote in The Guardian in 2001 about the 9/11 terrorists’ aversion to American power.
They weren’t making any absurd arguments, but apparently no one was holding back from expressing their views for fear of “repeating” the views of the terrorists who had just murdered 3,000 Americans.
On the contrary, as the leftist professor Todd Gitlin said in 2002, his liberal colleagues saw the 9/11 attacks as “a damning but understandable revenge…rooted in American crimes of action and inaction…reaping what empire had sown. After all, wasn’t America essentially the oil-hungry, Islam-disrespecting oppressor of Iraq, Sudan, and Palestine? Were the ghosts of the shah of Iran, Vietnam, and the Afghan jihad of the Cold War not rattling their bones?”
Liberals didn’t feel obligated to hate America any less just because the 9/11 terrorists hated it too. Why should immigration patriots change their views even a little because Crusius agreed with them? So did many voters—not too many, but enough to put Trump in the White House.
In November 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan shot up the Fort Hood military base while shouting “Allah Akbar!”, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others. He did so largely because he was livid about America’s war in Iraq.
Did Obama create a “toxic” environment by promising to withdraw all our troops from Iraq? Was that policy wrong because Hasan agreed with it? I don’t recall anyone saying, Well, now we have to stay in Iraq FOREVER because the terrorist didn’t want us to!
(And by the way, despite the drivel repeated every six minutes on TV about calling white killers “mentally ill” and penniless, oppressed Muslim killers “terrorists,” for months The New York Times and President Obama have been assuring us that Hasan is mentally ill, not a terrorist.)
Just two years ago, Bernie Sanders stalwart James Hodgkinson drove to the nation’s capital and gunned down Republicans on a Virginia baseball field, leaving House Majority Whip Stephen Scalise in critical condition, requiring multiple surgeries. Several others were wounded in the hail of bullets.
Hodgkinson was inspired to attempt mass murder by his passionate desire for universal health care and hatred of Republicans (especially Trump). These toxic beliefs were regularly reinforced by his favorite television shows, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Real Time With Bill Maher” and “Democracy Now!”
You want “material support”? All of those shows are still on! And the hosts still hate Trump! Indeed, every Democratic presidential candidate is promoting an agenda that could have been lifted directly from Hodgkinson’s Facebook page, from government health care to raising taxes on the “rich.”
Does this mean that universal healthcare is ipso facto a hateful and terrorist idea because Hodgkinson supports it?
Months before the shooting at the GOP baseball game, Hodgkinson wrote on his Facebook page: “Trump is a traitor. Trump has destroyed our democracy. Time to destroy Trump and company.”
Under El Paso’s fresh standard for defining beliefs as “hateful,” “toxic” and “material support” for terrorism, every Democratic presidential candidate should immediately be placed on a terrorist watch list.
