It took them long enough, but they finally admitted it after Christopher Wray (FBI head) laughably said it was a death by cop scenario — rather than an ideological Leftist shooting political adversaries Here is THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The FBI quietly admitted Friday that the 2017 Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field shooting that nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise has been classified as “domestic terrorism” carried out by a “domestic violent extremist” targeting Republicans after the bureau previously classified it as “suicide by cop.”
The revelation appears in the middle of an appendix on page 35 of a 40-page FBI-DHS report released on Friday titled “Security Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism.” In a section describing approximately 85 different “FBI-Designated Significant Domestic Terrorism Incidents in the United States from 2015 through 2019,” the Alexandria baseball field shooting appears, with the FBI categorizing the perpetrator as a “Domestic Violent Extremist” and describing the incident thusly: “An individual with a personalized violent ideology targeted and shot Republican members of Congress at a baseball field and wounded five people. The subject died as a result of engagement with law enforcement.”
In June 2017, James Hodgkinson, a man from Illinois who was living out of a van in Alexandria, opened fire at Eugene Simpson Stadium Park after asking GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan, who was leaving practice early, if the players were Republicans or Democrats. Hodgkinson struck Scalise in the hip, hit lobbyist Matt Mika in the chest, and injured two U.S. Capitol Police officers, Crystal Griner and David Bailey. Scalise nearly bled to death and required multiple surgeries before returning to Congress.
Hodgkinson, an avid liberal and supporter of Democratic presidential primary candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was killed by law enforcement. He had posted on Facebook that “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” and joined other groups such as “Terminate The Republican Party” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”…..
THE BLAZE notes a portion of the declassified FBI report:
An individual with a personal violent ideology targeted and shot Republican members of Congress at a baseball field and wounded five people. The subject died as a result of engagement with law enforcement.
Continuing, they also write:
The Republicans also noted that Hodgkinson had a “potential ‘hit list'” in his pocket. The names on that list were GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Morgan Griffith (Va.), Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.), and Jeff Duncan (S.C.).
AS A REMINDER…
… of the recent revelation by Director Wray that got common sense people saying WTF!? BYRON YORK (May 3rd)
….“On Nov. 16, 2017, the FBI briefed those of us who were at the field that day,” Wenstrup said at a House Intelligence Committee hearing featuring FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Much to our shock that day, the FBI concluded that this was a case of the attacker seeking suicide by cop.”
“We were just astonished,” Wenstrup told me in a recent conversation. “We just went, ‘What?’ I said, ‘There’s no way. If you want to commit suicide by cop, you just pull a gun on a cop.’”
Hodgkinson had obviously done much, much more than that. and the suicide by cop theory made even less sense in light of the fact that the Capitol Police who were at the baseball field that day — the security detail for Scalise, a member of the House leadership — were sitting in an unmarked vehicle, wearing plain clothes. Hodkinson would not have known they were police.
Wenstrup also noted that the FBI had not interviewed the members — the victims — in this case. They never interviewed Duncan, who had actually spoken to the shooter. “I asked (the FBI), ‘Who did you talk to?’” Wenstrup recalled. “They took my number, called me the next day. I called them back, and never heard from them again.”
At the hearing, Wenstrup noted that, “Both the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published products labeling this attack as a domestic violent extremism event specifically targeting Republican members of Congress. The FBI did not. The FBI still has not.”
Now, in light of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which is widely referred to as domestic terrorism, Wenstrup wonders what the FBI was doing. The attack “could have been a massacre,” Wenstrup noted. “The attacker may have believed he could change the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives in one morning.”
[….]
The unanswered question in all this is why the FBI, at the time under the leadership of acting Director Andrew McCabe, did what it did. Even at that time, the bureau was warning Americans of the danger posed by domestic terrorists. and yet the FBI refused to publicly recognize a clear act of domestic terrorism. Was some sort of Trump-era bias involved? Was it bureaucratic infighting? Something else? It’s time the victims in the case — and also the country as a whole — got some answers.
NEWSBUSTERS has info on this 200,134th example of media bias:
…The Sayoc headline read “Bomb Suspect Outspoken Supporter of Trump.” Wallace said that the headline really surprised him as he expected the headline to read “Suspect Arrested.” A closer inspection of the article finds that it does not even mention that Sayoc was the bombing suspect until the fourth paragraph.
Rather, the first three paragraphs read like a psychological profile of Sayoc, talking about his support for President Trump and all of the stickers on his van plus a quote from one of his former employers; who described him as “crazed.”
On the other hand, the headline after the Scalise shooting read “Congressman Shot in Va,” which clearly didn’t mention shooter James Hodgkinson’s supporter for Bernie Sanders. The front page article did not mention his support for Sanders but footnoted that his social media posts were “highly critical of President Trump and other Republican leaders.”
Even an article from The Guardian written on the day of the Scalise shooting was able to point out Hodgkinson’s political leanings. The Guardian article read: “Virginia Shooting: gunman was leftwing activist with record of domestic violence.” Yet, The Post, which brands itself as a nonpartisan guardian of democracy, could not bear to mention at least that much in its headline…
….Hodgkinson was a Bernie Sanders supporter who hated Trump, as his comments on social media showed.
But in the face of all evidence that Hodgkinson was a Democrat animated to go on a shooting rampage by his own political frustrations, New York Times political reporter Glenn Thrush looked to Trump.
“Any debate about civility in politics begins with Trump,” he said Thursday on Twitter. “No one has degraded discourse more, while embracing the fringe.”
Whatever “fringe” Trump appealed to, none of them have picked up an assault rifle to gun down a congressman.
That was a Bernie Bro.
In an effort to even the score between the GOP and Democrats, The New York Times editorial board chocked the incident up to “vicious American politics” and repeated the false claim that “the link to political incitement was clear” between 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the 2011 shooting of then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The paper later removed that part from its editorial, admitting that there was “no such link.”
Hodgkinson’s Facebook page showed that he belonged to the groups “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” One note on his Facebook said, “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
But a bemused editorial in the Washington Post asked, “Who knows what mixture of madness and circumstance causes someone to pick up a gun and go on a rampage?”
The Washington Post then helped spread responsibility for the tragedy among everyone, saying that it should “cause a gut check about what passes for political discourse in this country.”
Hodgkinson was a partisan Democrat. Before his shooting spree, he asked Reps. Ron DeSantis and Jeff Duncan as they left the field early whether it was Republicans or Democrats practicing.
But a willfully-clueless Scott Pelley of the CBS “Evening News” ended his Thursday night program decrying unspecified “leaders and political commentators who set an example” for having “led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric.”
When an outspoken Democratic voter opens fire on a group of Republicans practicing baseball, the media blame everyone. Or just Trump.
It’s the same thing they did during the 2016 campaign.
In May last year, anti-Trump protesters shut down a campaign rally in Albuquerque, N.M. Rioters lit the city ablaze, vandalized property, and threw rocks at cops.
But the New York Times said two months prior to the riot that it’s Trump who “gives license to violence” for saying he’d like to “punch” a protester. The liberal Mother Jones said the same month that Trump is “basically encouraging violence now,” and a headline at the website Vox declared that “the problem with violence at Trump rallies starts with Trump himself.”
Why isn’t any of the violence coming from the people who support the guy who’s supposedly fueling it?….
This appearance was yesterday, House Whip Scalise was shot today. You will hear why Leftists want to shoot conservatives and Republicans — small government, low taxes, power to the people. Socialism (the shooters political position) wants the opposite of these.
That sums up the rhetoric of the Left/Right distinction in dialogue. Two segments from Larry Elder, the “Prince of Pico-Union,” about the rhetoric of the Left when they say — “yes, the tone in politics is out of control… BOTH sides are to blame.” Not. In “Sage” fashion Larry points out the gap in civil dialogue. (See this earlier upload as well.) The “thumbnail” art piece is Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover art entitled, “Breakfast Table Political Argument,” or, “Dewey Vs Truman.”
David French over at the NATIONAL REVIEW has an excellent article on this topic, and is the one Prager is reading from:
The New York Times published its editorial in response to yesterday’s vicious, violent, and explicitly political attack on Congressional Republicans — an attack that wounded four and left Representative Steve Scalise in critical condition in a Washington-area hospital — and it is abhorrent. It is extraordinarily cruel, vicious, and — above all — dishonest. The editorial doesn’t just twist the truth to advance the board’s preferred narratives; it may even be libelous, a term I choose carefully.
Yesterday’s shooter, James Hodgkinson, left little doubt as to his political leanings and his political motivations. He was a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter, belonged to Facebook groups with names such as “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans,” and he was constantly sharing angry anti-GOP messages and memes. Before opening fire, he reportedly asked whether the players on the baseball field were Democrats or Republicans. In other words, all available signs point to an act of lone-wolf progressive political terror.
How does the Times deal with this evil act? The editorial begins innocently enough, describing the shooting and even forthrightly outlining Hodgkinson’s politics. But then, the board says this — and it’s worth quoting at length:
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right. (Emphasis added.)
Let’s be blunt. In its zeal to create moral equivalencies and maintain a particular narrative about the past, the Times flat-out lied. There is simply no “link to political incitement” in Loughner’s murderous acts. The man was a paranoid schizophrenic who first got angry at Gabby Giffords years before Palin published her map….
Larry Elder takes on a tour de force of the Left’s proclivity to mainstream violence in political language/life. Lots of audio (and edited in video) of many of the examples that were presented in yesterdays show. I cannot count how many times conservatives (myself personally), and Republicans have been told they are going to bring the human race to extinction. Most recently in a conversation the children of the person discussing the issue and my own were mentioned as having their lives gambled with by pulling out of the Paris/Kyoto Agreement.
I also noted on my FB 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 is crazy, and Democrats need to stop it. Period.
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….
“President Trump has passed more legislation in his first 100 days than any president since Harry Truman.” — Tom McClintock on Friday, April 28th, 2017 in a radio interview
Michael Medved interviews House of Representatives Majority Whip and representative for Louisiana’s 1st congressional district, Steve Scalise. Steve responds first to a statement by Rachel Maddow that the House Republicans haven’t done anything since they took office. Then the discussion focused on this administrations work to help the middle-class and lower class get work, leave the dependent lifestyle, and the like.
