Manson Family Values

At Big Journalism, Christian Hartsock explains “How John Lennon Killed Sharon Tate (and Other Ideas For MSM Narratives):”

John Lennon murdered Sharon Tate. Jodie Foster shot Ronald Reagan. Oliver Stone and Marilyn Manson caused Columbine. A dog ordered the Son of Sam killings. And Fox News, the Tea Party and the American right compelled Jared Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in Tucson.

The only reason these parallels don’t work is that while Charles Manson did in fact draw inspiration from “The White Album,” John Hinckley from “Taxi Driver,” Harris and Klebold from “Natural Born Killers” and (somewhat debatably) Marilyn Manson, and David Berkowitz from a Labrador retriever, there is no evidence Jared Loughner even watched Fox News or leaned right. Inconveniently, a former friend and bandmate described Loughern as “left-wing political radical” and “quite liberal,” and Loughner claimed The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page where he also released video burning the American flag.

But when it comes to exploiting human tragedy to “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” (in Saul Alinsky’s words), no facts will obstruct a perfectly salvageable mainstream media narrative.

Hopefully at this point though, this narrative is becoming increasingly unsalvageable for the left, as they keep encountering pushback.

Related: “In the wake of the horrendous shooting rampage in Tucson, why isn’t anyone talking about banning ‘Mein Kampf’? Or ‘The Communist Manifesto’? Or for that matter, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ ‘Peter Pan’ or ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’?”