It’s frustrating, but it’s just a fact of life now: following every mass shooting, there’s a mad rush to identify the shooter’s politics and blame those politics for warping the shooter’s mind. At least that’s the case if there’s even the slimmest of possibilities that the shooter could be a right-wing nutjob. Never mind that anyone who’d open fire on innocent people is evil regardless of their personal politics.
Following yesterday’s deadly shooting at a Highland Park, Illinois, Independence Day parade, you could almost feel some people’s excitement at the prospect that the shooter was an angry white male Trump supporter. NBC News’ Ben Collins is still very much excited by the possibility that person of interest (likely suspect) Bobby Crimo fits that profile, despite the lack of evidence so far to support that:
On Crimo’s social media activity ahead of shooting, @oneunderscore__: “He was deeply into the 4chan culture of you know, glorifying mass murder and also in these spaces, they talk about kill counts in the way you would talk about kill counts in a video game.” #AMRstaff
— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) July 5, 2022
On shooters groomed on the internet, @oneunderscore__: “These people traditionally come from far right spaces on the internet. They believe…that individually they are helpless in American society, and they turn to the culture of mass shooting.” #AMRstaff
— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) July 5, 2022
More from Collins’ Morning Joe appearance (transcript via Mediaite):
And also, I want to say, like, you can’t drill this down to one specific traditional political subculture. I know a lot of people want to point out that this guy was a Donald Trump fan. He had, there were pictures of him draped in a Trump flag or, you know, at a Donald Trump, outside of a Donald Trump motorcade. This guy, this is part of a much larger, deeper subculture that Donald Trump is in the past of, like this guy who grew up as a child, if Donald Trump was his president, he is trying to advance the accelerationism well past Donald Trump.
This guy is part of a new wave of terror, and that’s something that we have to get our brains around right now. This is not, this is not tied to one guy. This is tied to a much larger cell of people who think they’re loners, who are really acting in concert to express their disaffection with the world by murdering a bunch of people. We have to stop that. I don’t know how to stop that. The one thing that you can stop it at the very end is the gun parts. But we have to at least, you know, try to start to learn how people are getting to this point.
Collins is making a whole lot of claims about Crimo without really backing them up. Seeing as it’s literally Ben Collins’ job to tackle disinformation for NBC News, you’d think he’d be a little more careful about this sort of thing.
I think this article is supposed to be a dunk, but it's true.
The communities that Crimo was in online are far more accelerationist than what's talked about in traditional political media, and that's gotta change. They're effectively terror cells with much larger goals. https://t.co/R4SS8H41T8
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 5, 2022
We've gotta start having bigger conversations about this stuff, about doomerism, about blackpilling, about how extremist cults online interact with everyday politics.
They do not exist in the political binary we're used to. The internet fractured the culture in a million pieces.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 5, 2022
We can keep shoving our heads in the sand and wake up every few days to a new mass murder, or we can recognize this new reality of how people get radicalized and try to figure it out.
There is no one immediate prescription, but snarkily writing it off has led us here.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 5, 2022
Again, though: where is Collins’ evidence that Crimo was a radicalized right-winger?
NBC's Ben Collins says the July 4th parade killer was a "Trump fan" and that he was radicalized from the "far right" corners of the internet.
Is this true? Is there evidence to support this?https://t.co/ERlglmuTpchttps://t.co/WXTdNYAFYm
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) July 5, 2022
The shooter’s politics shouldn’t matter, but, as usual, NBC News’ disinformation reporter, is spreading misinformation here. The 2 pics he is basing this on are rather clearly of him mocking Trump supporters. https://t.co/N2mNkoNB4S
— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 5, 2022
“Misinformation” implies that Collins isn’t purposely misleading his followers. That seems like giving him too much credit.
Yeah, sure, Ben Collins…..
👖 on 🔥 https://t.co/sESBEzHnoI pic.twitter.com/sZ84kZoWBI
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 5, 2022
If that account in fact belongs to Crimo, that would appear to throw a wrench in Collins’ narrative. Not that he’d care.
My guess is that NBC's Ben Collins isn't a dumb person. He's purposefully dishonest and dangerous by priming a liberal audience for years to view non-liberals as dangerous.
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 5, 2022
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