Synagogue Shooter's Comments on Trump Were 100% the Opposite of What the Media Wanted
Don’t look now, but establishment media pundits like CNN’s Don Lemon have something in common with the deranged man who shot up a California synagogue over the weekend: They loathe President Donald Trump.
On Saturday, a woman was killed and several people were injured after a gunman entered a Jewish place of worship near San Diego and opened fire with a rifle. As news outlets scrambled to cover the story, some of them — CNN being the worst offender — seemed to champ at the bit to connect the hate crime to rhetoric from the president.
Just hours after the tragic shooting, Lemon used his anchor position at the Cable News Network to wildly speculate about what he deemed “white terrorism.” The news channel gave guest Joshua Stanton, a rabbi, a platform to try to link Trump to the criminal.
“I fear that politicians have brought hate mainstream in normalizing the rhetoric,” Stanton said on the air, hinting at Trump while Lemon clearly agreed. With the CNN anchor’s encouragement, the talk quickly turned to the president’s handling of the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that left one woman dead.
The implication was clear: Lemon and his guest believe that Trump’s presidency enabled or inspired the synagogue shooting, even if they danced around saying this outright. Why bring up Trump and Charlottesville otherwise?
But some pesky facts have thrown a wrench in that narrative. As more information about the accused shooter emerged, the establishment media’s assumption that he must be a Trump supporter fell apart.
While it does appear that the suspect holds ugly anti-Semitic views, he seems to despise the president.
The suspect “posted a 4,000-word anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and white supremacist manifesto he wrote and published online,” explained the news site Heavy.com.
In part of that manifesto, a “lightning round” of questions and answers he wrote himself, according to Heavy.com, the suspected shooter went on a profanity-tinged rant against Trump.
“The first question he answered was whether he is a Trump supporter. He wrote, ‘You mean that Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, traitorous c**ksucker? Don’t make me laugh,'” Heavy.com reported.
“I am not a conservative,” the manifesto also declared.
That’s something he appears to share with the suspect of the September synagogue shooting on the other side of the country.
“The Pittsburgh shooting suspect had posted on [social media] about why he didn’t support Trump, saying that he was not anti-Semitic enough for him,” Heavy.com explained.
By contrast, Trump was expressly thanked by the rabbi who was wounded in the San Diego shooting.
“He was just so comforting,” Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein told a news conference about the surprise call he received from the president, according to USA Today.
“I’m really grateful to our president for taking the time and making that effort to share with us his comfort and consolation.”
The president, Goldstein said, “spoke about his love of peace and Judaism and Israel.”
Now, to be perfectly clear, a strong distaste for President Trump is (hopefully) the only thing liberal blowhards like Don Lemon have in common with the suspected shooter.
Disliking the president does not make somebody a radical, and while we think Lemon is wrong, he uses words instead of violence.
But those words do carry weight. When a narrative is repeated often enough, there is clearly an agenda behind it.
That is the problem with establishment outlets like CNN: They appear to have let their pre-conceptions and assumptions influence everything, instead of simply reporting the news.
They assume that every hateful person — especially those who happen to be white — must be allied with Trump. They’ve put blinders over their vision, unable to recognize or admit that hatred and violence come in many forms, and those forms don’t always fit convenient political views.
The world is not that simple. The president is not a villain, and his supporters are just as saddened by this kind of violence as everyone else.
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