Another Mass Shooting, Another Tsunami of Progressive Propaganda
The war on our Constitution – and its stand for unalienable rights – continues.
By Bruce Thornton
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
On Saturday of this past weekend, a deranged 18-year-old man in Buffalo opened fire in a grocery store, killing ten people. The killer is white, and most of his victims were black. So no surprise that Twitter, which has replaced newspapers as the “first draft of history,” immediately started attacking Tucker Carlson and conservatives in general for “radicalizing” the shooter and being “racists.” And of course, supporters of the Second Amendment came under fire for resisting “common sense” gun laws.
In other words, this heinous crime by a deranged psycho reprises all the stale anti-gun clichés and “systemic racism” tattered narratives that progressives recycle to gain some political capital from this tragedy. Unless, of course, the perp is black, like the black man last November who drove his SUV through a Christmas parade, killing five people. No progressive outcry then, even though he had praised Hitler on Facebook and called for murdering whites. No political utility in that news, any more than in the thousands of black men, women, and children murdered last year, most by other black people. Black lives, it seems, don’t matter unless they’re ended by white people.
As for blaming conservatives, the 108-page manifesto the Buffalo shooter posted, assuming it’s authentic, is a mixture of grievances and bizarre ideas that could not be seriously described as “conservative,” even if one accepts the progressive big lie that all conservatives per se are racists. That, by the way, is why the Left has so assiduously promoted the “systemic racism” canard: any deranged racist nut can then be weaponized against conservative Republicans and media, especially Tucker Carlson, whose huge ratings embarrass and humiliate hack outlets like CNN and MSNBC.
But the shooter’s “manifesto attacks a number of news networks for hiring Jews,” PJ Media’s Matt Margolis writes. Tucker Carlson isn’t mentioned at all, just the “internet,” that font of wackiness of all political stripes. That didn’t stop CNN veteran and faux conservative S.E. Cupp – who in 2017 said nary a word about the Bernie Sanders acolyte who shot up Republican lawmakers practicing for a baseball game – from tweeting, “The toxic garbage being pushed by MAGA, Q, Fox, and even many GOP members of Congress has REAL consequences. But these are the same people who’ll insist right-wing extremism ISN’T a threat to our natl security — it isn’t even REAL, they say. It was very real in Buffalo today.” Apparently, some psychos are more equal than others.
Later in the “manifesto,” Margolis reports, the shooter tells us quite specifically his political identity: as an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist” and “leftist authoritarian” who rejects conservatism as “corporatism in disguise.” Typical of obsessive autodidacts, the bulk of the manifesto comprises “nonsense and garbage,” as Margolis puts it. But “eco-fascism” signals the left-wing radical environmentalism of terrorist outfits like the Earth Liberation Front, or eco-terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who from 1979 to 1995 murdered three people and wounded 23 with letter-bombs. These eco-terrorists, like fascists and communists, are fine with using violence to achieve their aims
The link of fascism and environmentalism, by the way, is not a slur. The Nazis were passionate environmentalists, and the Third Reich was the first modern nation to pass legislation protecting animals and nature. As historian Simon Schama writes, “Exterminating millions of lives was not at all incompatible with passionate protection of trees.”
The antihumanism of radical environmentalism could also be found in early 20th century progressive eugenics and fears of over-population of lesser “races” and “race suicide,” which provided the Darwinian authority for abortion preached by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Preserving the racial “blood” from contamination requires also preserving the “soil” as well, what is meant by the “ethno-nationalism.” If we’re looking for affinities between the killer’s antihumanist racism and political ideology, “white supremacism,” a fringe ideology rejected by conservatism, doesn’t align with the Right, if at all, as closely as the antihumanism of radical environmentalism does with Left. The same antihumanism also characterizes the progressive sacrament of abortion, which the Democrats in Congress recently attempted to make a national law that would allow abortions any time up to birth.
In addition to such politicized smears of conservatives for being “racist,” we will no doubt also be inundated with calls for stricter gun laws and policies on “ghost guns,” as if a sociopath intent on mayhem can’t get a gun legally, as the Buffalo killer did, or just steal one. The Democrat-run cities such as New York and Chicago have very strict gun-control regulations, which haven’t slowed their astronomical murder rates. Instead of hounding with specious regulations citizens exercising their Constitutional right to own a gun, the anti-gun nuts squealing about “gun violence” should be calling for tougher penalties for using a gun in a crime, and rolling back bail and sentencing “reforms” that let violent criminals back on the streets.
But we know what all these attacks and lies about guns are really about: weakening the Second Amendment. For more than a century the entire progressive playbook has focused on reducing the freedom and autonomy of citizens, families, churches, small businesses, and the states. The federal technocratic Leviathan centralizes and concentrates power in its agencies and bureaus that increasingly enmesh the people in intrusive regulations, with which they slowly erode the people’s rights and freedom.
And the Second Amendment is particularly a target since it counters the tyrannical regime’s most important aim – the monopolization of force. It’s no accident that the First Amendment guarantees free speech, and the Second guarantees self-defense. Those are the foundations of freedom, for without them no people can stay free for long.
So it’s no surprise that we’ve been seeing continual assaults on the First Amendment and demands for censorship camouflaged as “content moderation” or preventing “hate speech.” Even the ACLU, which once defended the First Amendment right of Klansmen to march in a Jewish neighborhood, are now minions of Big Brother.
Or the Dems scheming to pack the Supreme Court, countenancing threats against Supreme Court Justices, and indulging demonstrations in front of their homes in order to illegally intimidate them into ruling how the Dems want them to.
Or pushing to eliminate the Electoral College, and to base the number of Senators on population. The Electoral College and equal number of Senators for each state are two of the Constitution’s important defenses against the tyranny of a homogenized, dependent majority that Woodrow Wilson called a “single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive” controlled by its elite caretakers.
In short, what we are witnessing is the century-long progressive assault on the Constitution and its checks and balances in order to create the tyranny of the minority, that guild of credentialed cognitive elites who despise the working- and middle classes as “deplorables,” “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” and “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers,” upon whom elites look with an “ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections,” as Fred Siegel put it in his indispensable book The Revolt Against the Masses.
All the commentary that follows mass shootings is not about “gun violence” or “systemic racism.” Rather, it comprises propaganda for this old progressive ambition to dismantle the Constitution and its unalienable rights, which are the bedrock of our political freedom.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons