As deadly as it is exhausting and exasperating. Who has the vaccine for the pandemic of gun violence?
The New York Times can only muster a partial list of 2022 mass shootings in the United States. Counts bounce around. It’s hard to keep up.
Quick links from Steve Benen (Maddowblog) Tuesday evening:
* From early Saturday to late Monday — the Memorial Day weekend — there were at least 14 mass shootings in the United States: “Amid calls for gun control after last week’s massacre at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, shots rang out across the country over the Memorial Day weekend, with more than a dozen mass shootings in the span of 72 hours.”
* On a related note, this was one of the 14: “Ten people were injured, four critically, and three law enforcement officials were hurt Monday night after gunfire erupted in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, according to police.”
* This morning’s shooting in New Orleans, however, was not part of the aforementioned list: “A woman was fatally shot and two men were wounded as gunfire erupted near a high school graduation venue in New Orleans on Tuesday, officials said.”
Another list:
There have now been 17 mass shootings since Uvalde, per @GunDeaths.
3/ On Sunday night in Tulsa, 8 people were shot at an outdoor festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So far, one has died and others are in critical conditon. Several teenagers were shot.
And just imagine all the kids at that festival who saw the bodies and live with that trauma.
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.
The clip below of “Good Liar” Jason Selvig live-debunking a dude at the NRA convention posted Tuesday. Watch how swiftly the interviewee pivots away from his firmly held truth.
Dana Milbank this morning expands on the theme. What a glorious feeling to be released from the bonds of space, time, and reality (Washington Post):
Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!
Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.) went for the hat trick. Gozar tweeted that the Uvalde gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien.” Hours later, he deleted it.
On Fox Business, Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and prominent advocate of Ivermectin dewormer as a covid-19 therapy, blamed the shooting on critical race theory. “We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools; now we’re teaching wokeness,” he said. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.” Reminded by host Neil Cavuto that school shootings were happening long before CRT became a (Republican-invented) issue, Johnson added the claim that CRT was “going on under the radar for quite some time.”
Then came the ubiquitous Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who, fresh from a GOP primary victory, repeated in a live Facebook broadcast the false narrative that the perpetrator was trans (“wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing”). She also nodded to the conspiracy belief that the shooter couldn’t have afforded the weapons and therefore anti-gun forces must have given him the guns to create a pretext for gun confiscation. “He must have really been saving up,” she said.
Having a rational discussion of serious issues in the age of truthiness is pointless, says Milbank, not because there is no broad consensus on many, but because one side is “hijacked by disinformation.”
Republicans share 200-500 percent more fake news than Democrats, an MIT study finds. Researcher Brian Guay tells Milbank the amount of bullshit floating around the right-wing disinformation ecosystem is part of the problem. Guay believes Republicans share it more because they encounter it more. (“Flood the zone with shit,” yes?)
Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis: "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." https://t.co/YuCqFJZ6M5
If you saw “evidence” everywhere you turned, from people you trusted, that the country is being run by socialist pedophiles bent on disarming the populace, extinguishing your race and destroying the United States, you’d probably be outraged, too. At the very least, you might not be in the best frame of mind for a constructive conversation about ending gun violence.
Sean Illing call ours “an age of manufactured nihilism.” He wrote, “The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.” This makes it easier to follow a leader who will tell them what to believe.
Guay and Illing credit the right with too much good faith. They insist on being right even when they are wrong. They insist on having won even when they have lost. They insist on lying in the face of contradictory facts. They insist on spreading untruths that reinforce their sense of self and their sense that enemies are beasts. Fact-checking is for losers. Not for those who are meant by God to rule.
Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.
