‘Climate of Hate’ and the NYPD Murders
Let’s cut to the chase: we all remember how the entire left and its vast media apparatus rose up as one to blame the Tucson shootings on conservatives in 2011. The process began during breaking-news coverage of Jared Loughner’s rampage, as media airheads began speculating that Sarah Palin’s use of crosshair symbols on an electoral map had somehow inspired the killer.
This was not a one-off comment by some loon on MSNBC. It became a major media narrative — indeed, one of the strongest, most quickly-organized Narrative drives the mainstream media has ever mounted. Every big network and left-wing media outlet published lengthy chin-stroking pieces about Palin’s murder map. A contemporaneous example from CBS News can be read here; another from the Atlantic’s “The Wire” blog ishere. Examples are ubiquitous. One need only do a Google search for Sarah Palin’s name in early 2011 to find more.
The driving force of this despicable, slanderous Narrative was a presumed-guilty attitude toward Palin, and through her the rest of the conservative movement, for creating a nebulous “Climate of Hate” that made Loughner trigger-happy. No connection between any individual conservative and Loughner was necessary to sustain this narrative. The idea was that even the mildest criticism of big government and the left’s agenda was part of an ideological continuum that led inexorably to militias and lone-wolf madmen opening fire on politicians and officials.
Virtually nothing was known about Jared Loughner’s motivations when all of these vile, dimwitted “think pieces” were written, or when political opportunists looped additional prominent conservatives like Rush Limbaugh into the Climate of Hate. “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information,” mused Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who almost certainly knew enough of the then-confidential details of the Tucson shooting to know he was lying through his teeth. “He attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials, and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.”
After weeks of this garbage, we finally learned that Loughner had no connection whatsoever to any branch of the conservative movement, never saw Sarah Palin’s electoral map, and probably never listened to a Limbaugh broadcast. That didn’t really matter to the “Climate of Hate” narrative, which was always about using a very loose system of ideological guilt-by-association to make even the most kind, gentle, salt-of-the-earth conservative feel like an accessory to murder. ...
Posts
