Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online probes the factors motivating the armed man arrested at the White House correspondents dinner.
What we do know, however, is that the shooter was a progressive who hung out at Bluesky, and he seems to have been radicalized into committing violence by the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces. In his manifesto, he accused Trump of being a pedophile — clearly echoing years of careless Democratic rhetoric — and labeled his administration’s members as targets. He intended to kill them in order of importance, and it’s fairly obvious who ranked first. (Only Kash Patel, bizarrely and hilariously, was to be spared. Patel has enough problems as is and probably didn’t need this “blessing” from the shooter.)
It is desperately tiresome to watch the left disown the shooter while it refuses to acknowledge how freely insults and claims like “Trump may be a pedophile rapist” have flowed from leftists’ mouths. It has gotten to the point where that specific line — as a phrase of casual abuse — has simply dissolved into the ocean of political rhetoric in which we float nowadays. I don’t want to rehash the “stochastic terrorism” debate here: I am a First Amendment supporter, after all, and find any attempt to criminalize speech (and politics) to be abhorrent.
But there is little to say in favor of a wild, reckless lie intended to inflame. There are many out there who, because of the E. Jean Carroll case, consider it acceptable to call Trump a “rapist.” (I think that case was a pile of lies, but I’m giving leftists the benefit of the doubt here.) By contrast, there is not one responsible commentator in America who believes that Trump is a pedophile. It is simply a term that, when employed by those who should know better, is done as a nasty little splash of rhetorical tar, a jab with a sharp stick to bait the bear. Most people who hate Trump know it isn’t true — it just feels good to hurl such a nasty accusation.
