At 9 AM Thursday morning, the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio, says that an armed man attempted to “breach the Visitor Screening Facility” at their headquarters. An alarm was set off and the suspect then fled the scene. He has reportedly engaged law enforcement personnel in a chase and there has been a lockdown of Clinton County.
As of the writing of this post, the man remains unidentified, as are his motives. According to the Clinton County Emergency Management Agency’s Facebook page, the suspect has “not yet been taking into custody, but is contained. He is wearing a gray shirt and body armor, and is armed.”
Law & Crime reports that the suspect is “actively engaged in a shootout and standoff with law enforcement” at the time of reporting. ABC correspondent Aaron Katersky reports that the suspect is reportedly armed with “an AR15-style rifle.” The “contained” reference in the Clinton County Management statement seems to mean that the suspect is in a cornfield, pinned down by law enforcement.
While the motivations of this incident are not yet known, the right wing of the country has very quickly jumped into the conspiracy-minded defensiveness we have come to expect.
The very obvious connection that many are making is between the intense anti-FBI and law enforcement rhetoric and calls for the overthrow of the government being made by right-wing media personalities as well as elected officials. For all we know, today’s attack at the FBI offices in Cincinnati are not at all connected to tweets like this:
And incoherent gobbledygook like this:
Coupled with this fact-free sentiment:
Now, in all honesty, this might turn out to be unrelated to the Second Amendment fetish, anti-democracy movement that brought us an attempted coup d’etat during the last election. Who is to say? We UPDATE: It turned out exactly how you thought it would. But you know who’s ready to be persecuted? Conservatives.
This guy.
And this guy.
Why would traditional media outlets and most people with just the rudiments of critical thought make this connection?
No idea.
