It’s our thirst to understand “why” someone would carry out such a horrific act that drives our curiosity and animates our search for a political villain in these mass shootings.
Answers are always few and very unsatisfying. Trying to ascribe rational, logical thought processes to someone who is mentally ill is an exercise in futility. It doesn’t matter if he leaves a right-wing manifesto railing against blacks and Jews or swears allegiance to Antifa and claims to want to stamp out “fascism.” “Politics” — a shooter’s limited understanding of it — isn’t a catalyst as much as it is a touchstone to a reality of which he or she is only vaguely aware.
The most recent incident led to a familiar pattern. A man walked into a gay club where a drag queen show was underway. Before he was stopped, five people were killed and 18 were wounded. Given the gunman’s “target,” it was “naturally” assumed that the perpetrator was a right-wing fanatic who was driven to this mass slaughter by conservative politicians and online hate sites (like PJ Media).
A National Review editorial sums up the arguments on the left.
According to the burgeoning conventional wisdom, therefore, the true culprits for the Club Q shooting include Libs of Tik Tok, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk’s Twitter content-moderation policies, the “right wing moral panic” about drag queen story hours, and — of course — the entire Republican Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributed the shooting to the Right’s “anti-LGBT+ campaign,” writing: “Connect the dots, @GOP.” Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf told MSNBC that “right wing grifters, including politicians like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, they’ve been spewing this vile, hateful rhetoric about LGBTQ people . . . and we warned them that inevitably this would result in violence.” In the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that the shooting “seems hard to separate” from the Right’s “nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.” “Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame ‘mental illness,’” Brian Broome wrote in the Washington Post. But “it’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center — always looking to fundraise off of a tragedy — weighed in.
The mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, which saw a 22-year-old man charged with hate crimes and murder on Monday, came after years of intensifying anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, acts of violence and intimidation, and discriminatory legislation from far-right individuals and groups, including powerful Republican politicians.
Anderson Lee Aldrich was not influenced by right-wing “hate speech.” He was not “anti-LGBTQ” because he was, in fact, a “non-binary” person who preferred being addressed with the pronouns “they/them.” He had been hospitalized several times for mental disorders. But, apparently, Aldrich was influenced and motivated to kill fellow LGBTQ people by right-wing loudmouths?
“Words matter,” Whoopi Goldberg said on The View. “Words matter and people like Lauren Boebert who, you know, has been in the forefront of dissing LGBTQ+ people, is now saying her prayers and thoughts go with the families. Well, they don’t really need your prayers and thoughts. They needed your votes. That’s what they needed.”
What did people need when a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer opened fire on a number of House Republicans at a practice for the Congressional baseball game, putting House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in the hospital for six weeks? This came just days after Sanders warned on the Senate floor that if the GOP’s healthcare bill passed, “thousands of Americans would die” — a phrase echoed by most of the Democratic congressional leadership.
In 2017, a Tennessee woman attempted to run a Republican congressman off the road for his support for the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill. Does violent rhetoric from the left ever matter? Or is it only violent rhetoric from the right?
There have been more than 100 pro-life churches attacked since the Dobbs decision last summer. A man was arrested outside of the private home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitting he was planning to kill him. Using the left’s rationale to explain the attacks, we have to assume that left-wing rhetoric is to blame.
But that will never happen. And what’s really, truly frightening is that the left pretends not to see the hypocrisy of its position.
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