OH, I’M READY: Get Ready for a Week of ‘Fake News’ Hysteria.

Jim Geraghty:

No two ways about it, a guy who goes into a restaurant and starts firing his gun all willy-nilly is a bad dude, and he ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But now there’s going to be an eager effort to shift responsibility from him to whoever wrote about this restaurant. This guy sounds like he graduated from the Yosemite Sam School of Forensic Investigation, and if he hadn’t shown up at the doorstep of this restaurant, he would have shown up at the gate of Edwards Air Force Base asking about the aliens at Area 51 or stomped around the Pacific Northwest hunting Bigfoot. Blaming “fake news” implies a warning to everyone, “don’t write or say something that could set off some nut-job.” That argument assumes that there’s a rationality to the nut-job, and it’s our responsibility to not offer anything that could cause an irrational mind to lash out.

The real goal, as Glenn noted earlier, is to silence political opponents.