‘This is an attempt to distract from the fact that Trump’s rhetoric is inciting violence…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The only 2020 candidate known to have been endorsed by one of the three recent mass shooters downplayed the notion that their extreme political rhetoric was tied to the killer’s deranged motives.
It was not President Donald Trump.
Many in the mainstream media have been loath to acknowledge the far-left beliefs espoused by the Dayton, Ohio shooter, whose since-removed Twitter account promoted—among other things—socialism, Satanism and the candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
On Tuesday, Warren’s campaign called the reports covering the Dayton killer’s fanatical tweets a distraction—while also claiming, contrary to evidence, a “direct line” between Trump and the anti-immigrant El Paso, Texas shooter.
“Leaders have a responsibility to speak out and to not incite violence,” said Warren spokesperson Kristen Orthman as prelude to her 180-degree deflection, according to The Hill.
“But let’s be clear—there is a direct line between the president’s rhetoric and the stated motivations of the El Paso shooter,” Orthman said. “This is an attempt to distract from the fact that Trump’s rhetoric is inciting violence as extremist-related murders have spiked 35 percent from 2017 to 2018.”
A recent analysis of statistical data related to mass-shooting incidents showed that former President Barack Obama’s average was, in fact, higher in his last two years of office than the average number of mass-shooting occurrences and casualties in Trump’s first two years.
Moreover, the efforts to link the El Paso shooter to Trump explicitly contradict the shooter’s own manifesto, which stated that his views pre-dated Trump and in which he pre-emptively asserted that the media efforts to blame Trump were false.
That shooter survived and was taken into custody, meaning any underlying motives not outlined in his manifesto are yet discoverable.
Nonetheless, both left-wing politicians and media outlets have duplicitously sought to tie Trump’s politics to one shooting while claiming with the other that there is ‘no evidence’ of a political motivation.
Likewise, media sources reflexively attempted to link the shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival to right-wing politics based on a tweet recommending what they called a “white supremacist” text—until authorities revealed that the killer had far-left screeds in his collection.
That forced liberal “experts” in the study of extremism to finally acknowledge that anarchist and pro-socialist factions like Antifa might, at least, be contributing to some of the political violence.
“We see that in the far right, but we also see it in anarchists,” confessed Brian Levin, director of California State University, San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Levin later qualified those remarks by claiming violent extremism was its own political philosophy.
“Violence is not just a means to promote an ideology,” he said. “It’s become an ideology itself.”
True to leftist form, Warren shills responded to the charges of hypocrisy by levying more ad-hominem attacks against Trump.
I’d blame Senator Warren if she had been using violent rhetoric and trying to score political points and raise money stoking fears about an invasion. She’s not. You know the difference. Why carry water for Donald Trump, a man you know is an idiot? https://t.co/elki1plJNX
— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 6, 2019
The Warren campaign also sought to exploit the mass shootings as a fundraiser, with an appeal emailed to her supporters requesting donations to a Senate victory fund.
“It’s clear Republicans don’t have the courage to do something about this crisis,” Warren wrote. “We can’t wait for them to act—because they won’t. If we’re going to address the gun violence epidemic in our country, we need to take back the Senate in 2020.”
Warren’s tone-deaf deflection of the Dayton killer’s views is not the first time she has turned tragedy into political opportunism.
When the culprit in last year’s high-profile murder of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts was revealed to be an illegal immigrant, Warren immediately went on the offensive (in every sense of the word) by saying America needed to redirect its attention to the “real problems” related to immigration.
“I’m so sorry for the family here … but one of the things we have to remember here is we need an immigration system that is effective—that focuses on where real problems are,” she said, before diverting to an obsolete talking point about Trump’s short-lived child-separation policy.