6. The paranoid style in American politics is alive and well.
Televangelist Pat Robertson suggested yesterday that disrespect for Trump was a factor behind the shooting. “Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen,” he said on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club.” “Why is it happening? . . . The fact that we have disrespect for authority. There is profound disrespect of our president. All across this nation, they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news. It’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line: disrespect. … Until there is Biblical authority, there has to be some controlling authority in our society and there is none. … When there is no vision of God, the people run amok. We have taken from the American people the vision of God.”
Wayne Allyn Root, a columnist for the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review-Journal who warmed up crowds during Trump rallies in 2016, pushed the theory on Twitter that the shooter must be Muslim. After police announced that he was not, Root refused to back down or apologize.
“[G]overnment restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people. They will find a way,” former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly wrote on his blog. “This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”
-- To be sure, there are extreme views on both sides. CBS announced that it fired a company lawyer who wrote on Facebook yesterday that she was “actually not even sympathetic” to the shooting victims because “country music fans often are Republican gun toters.” “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” she wrote.
7. The fever swamps of the Internet have powerful megaphones, even when what’s being yelled is false. “Geary Danley was not the gunman … But for hours on the far-right Internet, would-be sleuths scoured Danley’s Facebook likes, family photographs and marital history to try to ‘prove’ that he was,” Abby Ohlheiser reports. “Danley, according to an archived version of a Facebook page bearing that name, might have been married to a Marilou Danley. Police were looking for a woman by that name in the hours after the shooting, but later said they did not think she was involved. The briefest look at the viral threads and tweets falsely naming Geary Danley as the attacker makes it easy to guess why a bunch of right-wing trolls latched on to him: His Facebook profile indicated that he might be a liberal …
“That phony story quickly embedded itself into the algorithms of Google and Facebook, where sites promoting the rumor remained at the top of the results for anyone searching for Danley’s name. … For a time on Monday morning, one of those 4chan threads falsely naming Danley as the shooter was promoted by Google as a ‘top story’ for searches for his name … The right-wing news site Gateway Pundit [which the White House has given press credentials to] also picked up these rumors as fact in a now-deleted article. … And on Facebook, a search for articles about Geary Danley promoted seven links leading to inaccurate stories about him. The eighth result is a debunking.” (BuzzFeed debunks 19 other hoaxes that spread online after the shooting.)
These are many of the same people that promoted Pizzagate, and the fact that the fake stories got as much visibility and traction as they did suggests that search giants and social media platforms still have a lot of work to do before they can be considered responsible corporate actors.
