There has been a great deal of talk about how the left’s hysterical rhetoric about Donald Trump led to the attempt on the former president’s life Saturday night, and it’s easy to see why. Call a guy Hitler often enough, and some people are going to get the idea that it would be a good and noble thing to rid the world of his baneful influence. Leftists have insisted, however, that as Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks was a registered Republican, the assassination attempt can’t be laid at their doorstep. It was, you see, just another manifestation of the overheated political climate created by none other than…Donald Trump.
Exploding this narrative on Wednesday, however, was a young man who had been a classmate of Crooks, and who offered some insight into the mindset of this mysterious young man who seems to have dropped onto the roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, from absolutely nowhere, with no social media history and no public traces at all. Fox News reported that “a former classmate of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks says the 20-year-old gunman once mocked him over his support of former President Donald Trump and had a general disdain for mainstream politicians across the political aisle.” Especially one of them, apparently.
Crooks’ former classmate, Vincent Taormina, recounted, "I brought up the fact that I'm Hispanic and, you know, I'm for Trump. And he said, 'Well, you're Hispanic, so shouldn't you hate Trump?'"
Now, where did Crooks get the idea that Hispanics should hate Trump? A Spring 2021 article in Dædalus, the open-access Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, sums up what the establishment media and leftist academics (as if there were any other kind) have been telling us for years about Trump and Hispanics. Entitled “Latinos & Racism in the Trump Era,” it “examines the roots, causes, and effects of racism experienced by Latinos in the Trump era.” The idea that Latinos actually experienced higher-than-usual levels of racism while Trump was president is taken for granted as axiomatically true.
The authors argue that “Trump and his administration were not the origin of Latinos’ experiences of racism, but his rise to power was, in part, derived from Latino racialization.” That is, people started being racist toward Hispanics and then voted for Trump. “Preexisting politics of Latino immigration, Whites’ fear of loss of status due to demographic shifts, and historical and contemporary processes of racializing Latinos were seized by the Trump administration and made central features of his renegade presidential campaign and policy agenda. White nationalist racism became the defining feature of the Trump presidency, making Latinos’ heightened experiences of racism, and the relegitimization of overt White nationalism, one of its lasting legacies.” Yeah, sure, that’s it.
All this is pseudo-intellectual twaddle, arising from a deliberate conflation of legitimate concern for border security and the economic strain of admitting massive numbers of migrants with “white nationalism.” But this is the kind of nonsense American young people have been taught for years.
Taormina, however, was not taken in. He says that he responded to Crooks, “No. He's great. He was a great president. He called me stupid – or insinuated that I was stupid." That sounds like a leftist, all right: force members of designated victim classes to play along and claim they’re oppressed, or heap abuse on them if they refuse.
Related: Presidential Assassinations Have Always Aided the Democrats
Taormina says this “happened during a discussion in an English class during the 2016 campaign. … Trump, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders were all still in the race.” Something is a bit off about this chronology: Taormina wouldn’t have called Trump “a great president” in 2016, when Bad Orange Man hadn’t spent even a day in the White House.
So it’s possible that the exchange took place later; whenever it happened, Crooks sounds like a typical leftist: “Taormina [said] that Crooks was usually quiet, except on certain topics that he seemed passionate about, including math and politics. And on those issues, he could be 'smug [and] arrogant.’…He would just talk, talk and act like he knew everything, especially politics related, and he would say it in a tone that was like, 'I'm better than you,' in a type of way." Of course.
Leftists still think they’re better than the rest of us. That’s why they think they have a particular right to rule, and to wish that Crooks had actually killed Trump, and to applaud the Biden regime when it treats Trump and his supporters as if they were criminals and dangerous terrorists. As far as leftists are concerned, that’s what we are, for daring to oppose their authoritarian fantasies. We saw the result on Saturday evening.
