The venality of pro-massacre Republicans and their “gun rights” supporters truly has no bottom.
As conspiracy theorists accuse survivors of the Florida school shooting of being “crisis actors,” President Trump on Saturday retweeted a fringe radio host who once used identical language to peddle hoaxes about the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012.
The host, Wayne Dupree, has also repeatedly attacked survivors of the high school massacre in Parkland, Fla., who are pushing for new gun laws after 17 of their schoolmates and teachers were killed with an AR-15 rifle last week. — www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Dupree tweet that Trump amplified is below:
It doesn’t speak to the gun debate, but comes on a day Trump was actively tweeting about arming teachers. It came on the day that conspiracy theorists, including Dupree, claimed the Parkland mass shooting survivors were actors.
Dupree, however, is a prominent conspiracy theorist who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting that left 28 people dead, including 20 first graders, was a hoax. Dupree claimed that grieving parents were actually “crisis actors” who were participating in a hoax as part of a conspiracy to impose gun control in America. [...]
Trump is praising Dupree as similar allegations circulate about the student survivors of the Parkland massacre being “crisis actors.” The claim that outspoken students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, especially David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, are crisis actors has gone viral on social media platforms. The conspiracy theory has also been advanced by NRA board member Ted Nugent and Donald Trump Jr. Social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, have attempted to remove this content, with very limited success. — thinkprogress.org/...
It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Trump intentionally wanted to direct his followers towards Dupree, to amplify his conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook and Parkland mass-shootings.
There is a direct connection between these conspiracy theories and the vile death-threats many Parkland survivors have received.
I hope the families report all these incidents and that prosecutors take them seriously and investigate each and every one of the incidents. Florida law considers a credible death threat to be a criminal felony. Prosecutors have previously charged kids as young as 13 with a felony for making such threats on social media. The people making threats aimed at Parkland survivors should be prosecuted, jailed and their rights to own firearms permanently suspended.
The current state of gun laws in this country is the result of a decades long propaganda, legislative and legal campaign by far-right groups to change the interpretation of the 2nd amendment. They have enjoyed almost unbroken success, as gun control legislation has been stymied by their pro-massacre accomplices in the Republican party.
As we fight them, we must remember that much of their propaganda is a fraud, as former US Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger reminds us.
— @subirgrewal