Seeking political symmetry in dozens of people shot dead in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, right-wing media sites began Sunday touting a report that the slain Dayton shooter was the real person behind a certain pseudonym on Twitter.
The person on that account professed to be a Satanist and socialist and sympathizer for the Antifa militant leftist group. The person wanted Joe Biden’s generation to die and liked Bernie Sanders but not Kamala Harris and ultimately favored Elizabeth Warren for president.
Right-wingers ran with that to social media to say the “liberal media narrative” of Donald Trump’s hatred fueling El Paso had been wholly undercut. They contended that the new information provided clear evidence that the problem in the country wasn’t anti-immigrant conservatism but godless socialism.
The real point was to provide … nonpartisanship, you might say, or a political stalemate.
Here was the right-wingers’ point: OK, the murdering guy in El Paso was pretty clearly a conservative, one of ours, but the one in Dayton was a liberal, one of y’all’s, so, you know, at the very least, let’s call the politics on these events even, shall we?
That is to say that mass shootings with semiautomatic weapons into crowds of innocent Americans are becoming common matters for political scorekeeping along the order of this kind of headline: Nearly two dozen shot dead by a Republican; Democrat fires back and kills eight.
It’s all hideous, and of course bogus.
First, President Trump was invoked as a possible factor in El Paso only for the powerful and compelling reason that he has expressed coded and hateful rhetoric toward immigrants.
He has called asylum-seekers invaders and criminals and used racist phrases about minority liberal congresswomen going back to where they supposedly came from.
In May, someone in a crowd during a Trump speech in Panama City, Fla., yelled “shoot ’em” when Trump decried caravans of asylum-seekers headed to the country. Trump reacted with visible amusement. He did not call down the shouter except to quip that “only in the Panhandle” could that be … said, or done, depending on how you took it.
Some would argue that an American president ought to take great pains to disassociate himself from any murderous shouting from a mob. But that was before the Trump Era.
The shooter in El Paso had posted a racist screed online hours before, parroting phrasing of a resurgent white nationalist terrorist movement in the country that hates immigrants and that—whether Trump means to inspire it or not, and I think he doesn’t because his megalomania simply doesn’t know any better—has become emboldened by his rhetoric and behavior.
That is worlds apart from the situation with a shooter in Dayton who apparently favored the candidacy of Elizabeth Warren.
The populist Massachusetts senator does not appear remotely complicit by any imagination’s stretch.
She has not attacked early morning drinkers and clubbers on entertainment strips in American’s urban centers.
She has mainly attacked policymakers who have favored the richest 1 percent, whom she also has assailed. But she has not suggested that any of the policymakers or wealthy elites should go back to where they came from.
To my knowledge, no one in any of her audiences has called for shooting policymakers or the top 1 percent. If they had, I’m rather certain she would have said, uh, no, that would be wrong.
Anyway, I’ve seen at this writing no statement from authorities citing that information as a clear or possible factor in the Dayton horror.
Why the monster in Dayton would shoot dead his own sister because he liked that Elizabeth Warren was railing against the richest 1 percent … I’m not getting the connection.
Meantime, closer to home, Trump’s most dedicated acolyte in Arkansas—former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins—weighed in on social media to defend Trump by declaring, “So, whose statements fuel black-on-black shootings? Whose statements fueled the left-wing socialist in Dayton?”
So, I answered him. Racist public policies beginning decades ago with Democrats but taken over by Republicans in 1964 fueled today’s racial division, causing inner-city abandonment and school re-segregation that led to the drug culture feeding gangs and violence. And, since authorities at that point hadn’t spoken to the Dayton shooter’s motivation, we couldn’t possibly say who or what fueled it.
I don’t know if Cummins actually wanted answers. He may have been intending only to flail about rhetorically in desperately imaginative defense of his hero’s language and behavior.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.