With a hat tip to DKos member annieli, whose diary yesterday included these observations about the Santa Fe High School mass murder suspect, and the right-wing propaganda machine’s attempt to obscure reality:
Perhaps that’s because the evidence paints a very different picture than the one Carlson would like his audience to believe. Paddock does indeed appear to have been radicalized, though not by agents of the Islamic State, as Carlson insinuated, but by anti-government extremists on the far-right.
Multiple witnesses recalled encounters with Paddock in which he espoused pro-gun talking points and lashed out angrily about famous government confrontations in Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Paddock also told one witness, weeks before the shooting, of his belief that the government was plotting to use the Federal Emergency Management Agency to seize everyone’s guns. And he suggested that sacrifices needed to be made in order to convince the American people of the need to arm themselves.
Pagourtzis is not the aberration the right would have the world believe, and the ideology and emblems that reflect his affiliations are not incidental to his decision to commit mass murder.
Michael Harriot, writing for The Root, elucidates the uncanny parallels in the views of another ordinary White male mass murderer, and how these views are downplayed by law enforcement and the media:
Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence that the 2017 mass murder on the Las Vegas Strip may have been motivated by extreme-right-wing ideology, law enforcement officials still say they have no idea what caused Stephen Paddock to commit one of the deadliest mass shootings of all time.
After losing a court battle to keep them private, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on Wednesday released a trove of documents from the investigation into the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting that left 58 people dead in Las Vegas.
The 1,200 pages of police reports, eyewitness accounts and interviews reveal that Paddock shared some of the same narratives espoused by the right-wing nuts who believe that the government is coming to confiscate their guns and implement martial law…
Even though the evidence seems clear as to what motivated Paddock, police and FBI agents still say that they have no idea what caused him to go on the shooting spree. Claiming an “ongoing investigation,” Clark County (Nev.) Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak said that no motive has been identified.
I’m sure their reluctance has nothing to do with the fact that the FBI has downplayed the dangers of right-wing extremism ever since Jeff Sessions took over the Department of Justice. If investigators declared Paddock a right-wing extremist, that would make him a terrorist and put the worst act of terrorism since 9/11 squarely at the feet of Donald Trump.
By a white man, too. Not one of those Islamic fundamentalists or black identity extremists they’d have you fear. I’m sure race doesn’t factor in this at all.
Nah, it must be something else.
As I noted in previous diaries about the Las Vegas and Santa Fe shootings:
The claims of other uses for these firearms — for sport, for collecting, for hunting— can no longer be used to justify their continued public circulation. These claims never should have been considered sufficient moral justification, when the known result of allowing anyone to purchase them is tens of thousands of people dying every year, just so a handful of firearm zealots can gratify their impulses through the uniquely American fetish with guns,
In reality hunting today is typically not a source of provision but actually drains family resources. Deer hunters, for example, spend on average twenty dollars per pound of venison acquired, once all the costs of equipment,licenses, transportation, unsuccessful hunts, and so forth, are calculated.3'
This hunting is doubly sexual-as a source of erotic enjoyment as well as an expression of masculine gender identity. In her ecofeminist critique of hunters' discourse, Marti Kheel cites a number of sportsmen and hunting advocates who understand hunting as an expression of aggressive male sexual energy.3 The following sampling of North American hunters'literature indicates the validity of a sexual interpretation of hunting. The pattern is that of a buildup and release of tension organized around the pursuit, phallic penetration, and erotic touching of a creature whom the hunter finds seductively appealing...
especially among emotionally fragile white heterosexual males:
In both school shootings and acts of domestic terrorism the perpetrators use guns and/or commit violence to resolve crises in masculinity and to constitute themselves as “tough guys,” real men.
What is it that prompts White males to spray bullets (and to be able to do so with near impunity)?
The intertwined sociocultural cancers of toxic masculinity and White supremacy.
it’s not hard to see these elements in virtually every episode of mass murder we’ve witnessed with increasing frequency in the past thirty years.
Jennifer Wright at Harpers Bazaar shines a spotlight on the truth of toxic masculinty, suffused with White supremacist beliefs, right in front of us:
When men like Billy Bush say that “For a man, [losing your job is] the ultimate degradation” well, I can’t help but feel that men may be overstating the importance of maintaining a job. Certainly, I can think of more degrading things. Having to grovel for my life before an incompetent former co-worker who felt he was owed a job or he’d kill everyone, is one of them.
Even the most innocent seeming victims, who could not possibly have “wronged” these men in any way don’t seem immune from their rage.
A great many mass murderers have a history of domestic violence. They range from Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub shooting, whose ex-wife claimed he took her paychecks, forbade her from leaving the house and beat her if she did not live up to what he perceived as being her duties; to Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic and had been accused of domestic violence by two of his three ex-wives…
Elliot Rodger, who killed six people near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, before fatally shooting himself, stands out as a man who very clearly explained his motive for shooting. In his final video titled “Retribution,” Elliot claimed, “You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime because I don't know what you don't see in me, I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it.”
I can assure you that not wanting to sleep with a man is not a crime. Killing six people and injuring 14, as Rodger did, is…
The terrifying thing is that, within circles of toxic men that comprise those like the alt-right—a movement that decries feminism and celebrates white nationalism—the men who commit these crimes do receive affirmation that they perhaps felt denied in life. The Southern Poverty Law Center explains that:
“The 'supreme gentleman,' a title Rodger gave himself… has since become a meme on the alt-right.”
Fan pages for Elliot Rodger, with titles like “Elliot Rodger is an American Hero,” sprang up on Facebook.
The fact that these actions are in any way celebrated or joked about can only serve as an incentive for other men who feel they are owed more than the world is offering them to behave violently. A movement telling them their sense of entitlement is rational, and that women are bitches and, as Dylan Roof believed, black people are “taking over our country”—well, it probably doesn’t do much to stop men from acting on their most violent fantasies.
There have, thus far, been 13 alt-right related incidents.
When we have enough data points, we can no longer claim we lack the evidence to say definitively what is happening: White males with fragile egos are slaughtering hundreds of people each year in sexualized dominance displays, precisely because of their feelings of inferiority, of displacement from their ‘rightful’ position atop the sociopolitical hierarchy.
There is a national organization predicated on toxic masculinity and White supremacy: the GOP.
Toxic masculinity and White supremacy are the the GOP’s raison d’etre, and the sham ideology of conservatism is nothing but a euphemism riddled word salad to camouflage this grotesque core, as embodied (literally and figuratively) in the person and election of Trump:
This election was about ‘issues’. The issues were racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and homophobia. (Nov. 12, 2016)
African-Americans and Latinos, women and LGBT individuals face the same economic hardships (or worse), and are confronted with discrimination, demeaning treatment, political and social shunning or invisibility, and often outright violence. Yet they can see that justice and equality for any of the other groups is not just a way to gain equality of justice for themselves, but a moral imperative, precisely because of what they themselves face and have been subjected to.
Somehow, all of these folks are able to translate their experiences into empathy, but the white supporters of Trump don’t. I’ll say again, it is a moral failing, and I’m not prepared to excuse them because of their ‘hardships’, real or imagined.
But to be clear, I’m skeptical of the characterization that there are a substantial number of Trump supporters who meet any reasonable standard of ‘decent people’…
The grotesque bigotry exposed by this election represents the singular social, economic, cultural and political issue to be addressed. Why? Because there are no political and economic issues that don’t include elements of discrimination— systemic, institutional, pervasive discrimination— that impacts all matters of equal justice, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity for education and economic advancement, protection of the environment, constraining corporate abuses.
If you are a progressive, and you say your focus is on any of these issues, than you must recognize that the fight against racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and homophobia takes precedence…
I truly don’t understand how so many progressives fail to grasp this— indulging and excusing racism, misogyny, homophobia and religious intolerance doesn’t ‘bring the bigots into the conversation’, it let’s them off the hook.
We now have had an election that makes the worst of humanity the reference standard for the country…
If we are not prepared to face the reality of what is ‘right in front of our nose’-- what the message of this election is, and what it says about those prepared to vote for Trump, then at that point, we as progressives have failed to address the most urgent issues in the nation, the issues we have never been able to resolve— racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and homophobia.
We are in a fight for whether America is to be an inclusive, pluralistic society, nothing less.
This is not about opposing perspectives on philosophical abstractions— this is truly about life and death, and a political cult whose creed is the natural right of White cis-gender hetero males to enforce their preferences, and enact their emotional disturbance, through violence.
No one who calls themselves a progressive can, in good conscience, contribute to the normalization of this cult:
If they vote GOP, they are complicit in mass murder. friends, family and neighbors need to be told. (May 18, 2018)
******
As I have said before, and will keep saying until weapons of mass murder are removed from the possession of everyone who now holds them:
Whatever pleasure you take from holding a firearm does not justify every other person living in fear for their life on a daily basis.
If that feels like an inconvenience, an imposition, or an intrusion on something you deem important, I find it an intrusion on something I deem important that I have to worry whether one of my adult children might not come back alive if they decide they want to go to a concert. I shouldn’t have to worry about that, and they shouldn’t have to think twice about just living their lives as they choose, just so you or anyone else can fire off 30 rounds without reloading.