When you do nothing but call your opponents racists, Nazis, homophobes, Islamaphobes, Uncle Toms, xenophobes, sexists, etc. as a matter of course, you have zero right to be surprised when violence is used against the same opponents by the fringe. Rhetoric like that can never relieve the shooter of ultimate responsibility, but it lays the foundation for violence like what we saw today. There is a lot of screwiness on the “right” side of politics, these days. But it has NOT become violent. — Josh Charles
A few excerpts from James Hodgkinson’s (the shooter) letters, in his own words, via TWITCHY:
“As for my loving President Obama, I say when people look at the other side, the choice is obvious. I don’t want a president who won’t even keep his money in American banks. I don’t want a president who will lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the other 99 percent.”
“These men are trying to buy our country. You know they expect something for all this money. That something is that Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress won’t raise their taxes. We all know that the rich don’t pay enough taxes.”
“If the rich paid their fair share of taxes today, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. We need to vote all Republicans out of Congress. We need to demand Congress add 10 or more brackets to the existing tax code. We need 20 brackets to $20 million, and a 60 percent top marginal rate.”
“We can get our country back if we all vote the right way.”
[….]
“Let’s vote all Republicans out of Congress, and get this country back on track. We need 10 more tax brackets for income over $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million and $10 million.”
‘These guys are cheating everyone in this country while telling us all the time that they are broke when it is the super rich with all the money.’
[….]
“A strong middle class is what a country needs to prosper. The only thing that has trickled down in the last 30 years came from Mitt Romney’s dog.”
The Shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise is a radical Leftist. He was deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He railed against the one-percent. Was a long-time fan of Bernie Sanders years before he ran for election. Mind you. the media has a role in egging people on that may have these radical tendencies. On my Facebook, I noted this:
If Republicans are “worse than terrorists”… why wouldn’t Leftists shoot them [us]? Yes, the Democrats (Bernie Sanders intimated this as well as others) say we are worse than ISIS due to rejecting the idea that mankind is driving in a significant manner climate change. The shooter had many posts on climate. I mean Democrats are seriously considering jailing Republicans for denying AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
This shooter was also egged on by Democrat politicians (the following is adapted a bit from FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE):
…What made James Hodgkinson believe that stopping the repeal of ObamaCare was a matter of life and death? Or, as he put it, “Republicans Want to Deny Most All Americans Health Care”?
It was Bernie Sanders who claimed that “thousands of Americans would die” if Republicans repealed ObamaCare. “Families will go bankrupt. People will die,” Elizabeth Warren had tweeted.
James Hodgkinson was a big Bernie supporter. And he was a fan of Elizabeth Warren.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe — “People are going to lose lives.” Instead of trying to push gun control, he might have revisited his own rhetoric.
Congressman John Lewis claimed that the repeal would kill.
Congressman Ruben Gallego insisted that he didn’t have to be civil to Republicans because their “policies that are going to kill people”.
It’s a short step from accusing Republicans of killing people to suspending civility to wishing them dead.
[….]
And Democrat politicians were downright restrained compared to some of their media allies.
Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald wanted to see every Congressional Republican who voted for ObamaCare have a family member perish. “It should be their loved ones who die,” he ranted. “The goprs in congress didn’t just send out a tweet wishing for me to face my own death. They actually voted to do it. If people don’t give a damn about the consequences of what they do, they should face those consequences,” Eichenwald wrote in a statement.
James Hodgkinson was a fan of the Rachel Maddow show. Eichenwald was an MSNBC contributor and his work had been touted by Rachel Maddow.
Calls for violence against Republicans had become normalized.
A few days before the attack, the Huffington Post ran a piece calling for executing Trump “and everyone assisting in his agenda”. It has since come down, but a similarly themed piece defending a “violent response” to President Trump is still up.
Julius Caesar reimagined as Trump and leftist activists as his heroic assassins made headlines. “Killing Republicans” in neighboring Brooklyn did not.
“They should be lined up and shot,” Professor John Griffin posted of Republicans over the ObamaCare repeal. Professor Lars Maischak at Frenso State proposed “the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”
And it didn’t end after the shooting.
“If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking potshots at the GOP house leadership considered self defense?” Malcolm Harris, a regular at the New Republic, whose work has appeared at the Washington Post and Salon, inquired.
[….]
“Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the Most Dangerous Organization in Human History!” was one of the messages on his Facebook page. According to Chomsky, appearing on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Republicans are committed “to the destruction of organized human life on Earth.” Forget health care. Republicans are actually trying to wipe out the species by denying Global Warming.
James Hodgkinson participated in the People’s Climate March. Its theme, like Chomsky’s, was that Trump and Republicans were a threat to the entire planet.
If that’s true, shouldn’t someone save the planet by doing something about those Republicans?
Hodgkinson was taught by the left that all problems were reducible to Republican evil. He quoted Robert Reich, a Sanders Institute fellow, claiming that the poor economy was due to tax cuts for the rich.
[….]
“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co,” Hodgkinson ranted. Trump isn’t destroying our democracy. The leftists trying to bring him down are.
The left has whipped up an angry mob and promised them that if they scream and shout enough, President Trump will be forced out of office. They manufactured a crisis and now it’s exploding on them. If they can’t deliver a coup, there will be more shootings like this one.
The Democrats are sleepwalking into a civil war. They want power, but like leftists from Russia to Cuba, they haven’t seriously contemplated the price that will have to paid for their bloody utopia.
Mind you, Loretta Lynch was not calling for people to be violent… but if Sarah Palin was the reason (according to Democrat politicians and the media) for Gabby Giffords being shot because of rhetoric… here is Paul Krugman’s viewpoint:
When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
Put me in the latter category.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event …
There isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right …
So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before?”
…then why not in this case? IN other words, the Left (politicians, the media, the culture, entertainment) has an extreme amount and acts of violence against conservatives, Trump supporters, as well as violent language (rhetoric). Jared Loughner was not a “Righty,” but James T. Hodgkinson was a “Leftist.” Many of the recent violent acts in fact are by person’s from the Left:
Elliot Rodger (“UCSB” shooter): Fan of the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
James von Brunn (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter): von Brunn hated Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Shooter): Registered Democrat and Muslim.
Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard shooter): black liberal/Obama voter.
Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter): Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
James Holmes: the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occu¬py guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians.
Amy Bishop: the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
Andrew J. Stack (IRS bomber, flew plane into IRS building in Texas): Leftist Democrat, hated Bush and capitalism.
James J. Lee (who was the “green activist”): leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel – progressive liberal Democrat.
John Patrick Bedell: (Pentagon Shooter) registered Democrat, talked about economic justice.
Nkosi Thandiwe (Shooting spree targeting white ppl): Accepted “white priveledge.”
Floyd Corkins (LGBT Chic-Fil-A shooter): hated conservative and Christians.
Karl Pierson (school shooter): loved communism, self-avowed Keynesian, hated Adam Smith and supported gun-control.
(For a list of LEFT-WING murderers/killers, see this article.)
THANKFULLY, the shooter will be added to the “Failed assassins (whose politics we know)” column:
…Even I initially thought that whoever did it was either a Republican or some backwoods, tinfoil-hat-wearing pseudo-Libertarian. Now that it’s come out he is a Democrat/Independent, it’s no surprise; virtually every assassin or would-be assassin of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have been leftists (to the extent that their political views are known).
Successful assassins (whose politics we know):
John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, shot and killed President Lincoln
Charles Guiteau, a member of the communist Oneida Community, shot and killed President Garfield
Leon Czolgosz, a leftist anarchist (similar to the useful idiots in the Occupy movement) shot and killed President McKinley
Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, shot and killed President Kennedy.
Failed assassins (whose politics we know):
Severino Di Giovanni, a leftist anarchist, tried to bomb President-elect Hoover’s train
Giuseppe Zangara, a professed anti-capitalist, tried shooting President-elect Franklin Roosevelt
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, two Marxists, tried killing President Truman at the Blair House
Samuel Byck, who tried joining the leftist Black Panther group, attempted to kill President Nixon
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, member of the Manson Family and also a hippie environmentalist, shot at President Ford
Sara Jane Moore tried to kill President Ford as well because, as she said, “the government had declared war on the Left.”
Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a leftist connected to the Occupy movement, tried getting a one-in-a-billion shot at President Obama by firing a gun at the White House
The only individual whose political motivations can be deduced as coming from the right side of the political spectrum is Francisco Martin Duran, who claims he was “incited” by conservative talk-show host Chuck Baker, but also claimed that he was trying to save the world from an alien mist which was connected by an umbilical cord to another alien in the Colorado mountains. So there’s that….