Trumpists See ‘Loony Leftists’ and ‘Common-Sense Gun Laws’ as the Real Threat After Mass Shootings
George Orwell wrote that “in our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” His words could not better describe far-right conservatives spinning fantastical theories about who and what is to blame for the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Take the members of the right-wing intellectual community who are embarrassing themselves with convoluted and spurious arguments in defense of the president like Julie Kelly, an editor of the Trumpist website American Greatness. While Kelly is perhaps a minor figure in the conservative community, she has been getting much airtime from Sebastian Gorka, one of her major admirers. Like Tucker Carlson, who said on his program Tuesday night that a white nationalist threat “is just like the Russia hoax,” Kelly asserts that anti-Trump forces have “invented another imaginary threat they hope to weaponize against the president… ‘white supremacist’ terrorism.” According to Kelly, this “imaginary threat” exists only to pressure voters “into defeating Trump… next year.”
She calls conservative writers who do not support her views like National Review writer David French, “a never Trump promoter of the white supremacist fallacy” and also objected to National Review editor Rich Lowry’s call for the FBI to go after white supremacists like it once went after the Klan. To Kelly, the FBI is led by partisan holdovers from the Mueller-Comey era, which means that of course they too would manufacture a white nationalist threat. The real threat are “strong-arm tactics that will… violate the free speech” of Americans. She actually fears that Republicans and even the president could be banned from social media for tweets that others say help the racists.