Before his social media posts were scrubbed, the madman behind Saturday’s synagogue massacre, Robert Bowers, posted about his opposition of President Trump. Yet despite his antipathy toward the president, many in the media are blaming Trump for the attack anyway.
Online, Bowers ranted against Trump, deriding him as a “globalist, not a nationalist” and complaining that he was permitting a “kike infestation.”
“For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn, or even touched a maga hat,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, many media personalities still believe Trump inspired Bowers’ homicidal hatred.
CNN’s David Axelrod said Trump’s rhetoric “activates” mentally “imbalanced” people like Bowers.
“The most important thing isn’t for the president to visit Pittsburgh but it’s to sit back and think about the rhetoric that he’s using and everyone in public life needs to do the same thing,” Axelrod said. “But we heard this man held Jews responsible for this invasion of refugees from Latin America that he’d been ranting about this on his posts. We know what we’ve heard in the politics the last few weeks and we hear it at the president’s rallies all the time about treating this rag tag band of refugees a thousand miles away as an invading army and if you speak in that siege language, you’re going to activate paranoid madmen like the guy, Bowers, who ran into the synagogue today with the intent to kill. So this should be a pause for reflection, not for obligatory statements of sadness, and the gun debate is clearly important, but there’s something bigger going on that we’ve seen play out in the last week that deserves our attention.”
ABC’s Matthew Dowd blamed both Trump and Fox News for inspiring the attacker:
MSNBC guest and NYU journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, said Trump is radicalizing Americans not with “dog whistles” but rather “vuvuzelas”:
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CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the killer was angry about an “invasion” of Jews into America, and Stelter said the word “invasion” is common in conservative talk radio:
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“On talk radio, you hear about it an alleged invasion that obviously is not really happening,” Stelter said. “That’s the rhetoric on the far right. Some of these issues with this suspect and with the bomb suspect in Florida, it’s about our poisoned information environment.”
MSNBC’s Malcolm Vance suggested President Trump is responsible for the growth of a neo-Nazi movement in the United States, and accused Trump of making “veiled anti-Semitic remarks,” which he said came in the form of criticizing George Soros.
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GQ’s Julia Ioffe said the president enabled this massacre to occur. Ioffe will soon be joining the staff at The Atlantic:
Editor’s Note: This post is being updated as the story develops.