CNN's Amanpour vs. Kellyanne Conway: Will You And Trump's Advisors "Seek To Restrict His Twitter Use" After Mass Shootings?

Real Clear Politics

"CNN's Christiane Amanpour grills Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway about the El Paso massacre and Trump's inflammatory language when talking about immigrants.

" 'The experts say there are climates of hate that are created, usually from the top," Amanpour said. "So I'm asking you: Will you and the president's advisors seek to restrict his Twitter use and his other use of these words? What he said about Elijah Cummings, what he said about Baltimore, what he says about migrants? Yes or no, it is simple, because if it is no, it stays there at the top."

" 'No, I'm not telling you what we discuss with the president," Conway fired back.

" 'No, I'm asking you, do you agree with that?" Amanpour interrupted. "Do you agree with it? Infestation. Invasions. These are important words. Look back in history, Kellyanne."

" 'You keep repeating it because a day ago your network insisted that the president would not come out and denounce racism, white supremacy, bigotry, call this evil, call him a monster, try to fix our mental health system," Conway replied.

" 'So the simple follow-up question is, will he then not say those things on the air, on Twitter, on social media again?"

" 'I'm not going to allow you to equate him with the murderers," Conway replied.

" 'You know I didn't do that, I'm asking about his words," Amanpour said.

" 'I heard a lot of words on your network and others the last couple of days," Conway said. "You are talking to the world. You have to own it.' " . . .

Dayton Shooter Connor Betts: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Heavy

"Connor Betts, who was named by police as the body armor-wearing, masked gunman who fatally shot at least 9 people, including his own sister, in Dayton, Ohio, had shown red flags since high school, when former classmates say he drew up a hit list and was a bully.

"Betts was also in a “Pornogrind” Band that, according to Vice News, “released songs about raping and killing women.” Vice called it the “extreme metal music scene.” The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like “6 Ways of Female Butchery” and “Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter,” Vice reported.

"A woman he briefly dated, Caitlyn “Adelia” Johnson, told The Toledo Blade that he took her to gun ranges and showed her body camera video footage from a mass shooting, causing her to break off the relationship by text message. She also told the newspaper that Betts confided that he was bipolar and had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

"The tragedy left at least 27 more injured in a popular bar and restaurant district in Dayton, Ohio." . . .

5. On Twitter, Betts Described Himself as a Leftist & Wrote About Hell & Guns

. . . "On Nov. 2, 2018, he wrote: “Vote blue for gods sake.” NBC News reporter Ben Collins also said on the air that Connor Betts had a social media presence and identified himself as part of the left, and that he “tweeted about Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.' ” . . .

Cultural Appropriation 101

Mike Adams

"It once was the case that only those foolish enough to take a course in sociology risked being accused of “culture appropriation.” Unfortunately, the concept has leaked out into the larger society to the extent that I now get emails from people seeking advice on how to respond to the accusation. The following is an example of an email I received just a few days ago:

Hello Mike: I have a question. I don’t know if this is appropriate to ask, but what is your response to cultural appropriation? I think it is stupid liberal whining, but how do I address it in a "high road" way? Are there any articles or schools of thought resources I can research? Thanks! Alicia.

"Having found no specific resources, I decided to publish my brief response in column-form so that those facing the accusation will be prepared. It is brief, but here is all you need to know the next time you are accused of “appropriating” another culture:

Dear Alicia: The concept of cultural appropriation is like a lot of progressive ideas. It is so ridiculous that all you have to do is ask the proponent of the idea some pointed questions in order to poke a hole in the concept. Let’s start with an example.

 Several years ago, some fraternity men were accused of cultural appropriation because they decided to throw a Cinco de Mayo party at which they all wore sombreros. The results were predictable. They got drunk, they posted pictures of themselves wearing sombreros all over social media, and then people got offended. That led to the specific accusation of cultural appropriation and subsequent trouble with their school’s administration. The question is: What would you do if faced with a similar accusation? 

 There are two possible responses I would recommend – the first slightly aggressive and the second much more so.

Keep reading... 

Dems, in Showing Their Extremism, Do Nation a Favor

David Limbaugh

"In Wednesday evening's Democratic presidential debate circus, the left's favorite darlings turned on one another with a selfish vengeance, which was a positive development for the country and mildly entertaining. The glorious infighting continued among progressive commentators.

"This acrimony, coupled with the public exposure of the left's crazy ideas, surely diminished the party's image among sane voters. The more leftists reveal their inanity and extremism, the better for President Trump and the nation. As one lifelong-Democrat African American caller told Rush Limbaugh the day after the debates, "The Democratic Party is no longer recognizable to me." 

"The consensus was that frontrunner Joe Biden was verbally awkward, tripping over numbers and phrases, and providing confusing instructions to viewers seeking to sign up for text message updates from his campaign. While fellow Democrats gave Biden a pass for his politically incorrect comments during his term as vice president, he got no such slack for his debate faux pas. 

"To be fair, however, you don't have to do much these days to run afoul of progressive thought police. All it took was for Biden to tell Kamala Harris as she was introduced to the stage, "Go easy on me, kid." Biden was obviously referring to Harris' aggressive attacks on him during the previous debate and playfully, even deferentially, asking her to soften her blows." . . .

Far be it from me to defend Joe Biden, but does anyone really believe he intended condescension and sexism there? Yes, I realize the thought police don't care what he meant and are eager to see subconscious slights where none were intended. But give me a break. Biden was just being Colloquial Joe. Period. Even Harris told CNN's Anderson Cooper she wasn't bothered by it.

Read more at JWR

Why It’s Wrong To Blame Trump For The Mass Shootings

Trump doesn’t have a monopoly on divisive rhetoric. It’s time for the left to reckon with its role in sowing division and racial discord.

Mr. CNN

"From ISIS to El Paso, then, the terrorists in question are driven by a purposeful—obviously evil—ideology. The Islamists feel it’s their duty to fight back against the West. The El Paso and Christchurch shooters feel it’s their duty to fight back against mass immigration and what they view as the “replacement” of their culture.
"Indeed, the El Paso shooter expressed a feeling of invasion and occupation—a feeling usually associated with the anti-immigrant right in America but one not wholly alien to the left. After all, it is on exactly those grounds that Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, among others, justify the Palestinian liberation struggle.
"Blaming Trump for such views is a brittle chain of reasoning because it’s the same reasoning that would blame Islamist terrorism on the Quran. One could argue that Islam isn’t the cause of Islamist terrorism, and that the latter is just a warped and extreme manifestation of certain relatively subdued strains in the latter. The ordinary Muslim understands he is called to worship Allah and keep his commands, even if it sets him apart or imposes obligations on him. In contrast, the Islamist terrorist understands his duty is to impose Islam on others, even if it means slaughtering civilians or other Muslims.
"So too one might say that Trump is not the cause of the shootings, but that the shootings and Trump arise from the same root cause: the feeling among many Americans that their country and its heritage are under attack, and that nobody is fighting back." . . .

Todd Starnes: CNN Used El Paso Massacre to Take Cheap Shots at President Trump
"I watch CNN, a network not prone to decency, so my radio show audience does not have to.
"That was an act of public service I made to listeners of The Todd Starnes Show audience when we launched the program more than two years ago on Fox News Radio.

"There’s no reason for anyone to be unnecessarily exposed to the leftist propaganda spewing from the mouths of Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper or that stomach-churning morning show."

CNN jour...um,reporters

Trump Hits Back At Media After Accusations Of Inciting Two Mass Shootings

Did the press blame Obama for the horror of Sandy Hook?

Daily Wire  "President Donald Trump hit back against the news media on Monday after he was consistently blamed for causing the pair of mass shootings that occurred over the weekend."  . . . 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

The Media has a big responsibility to life and safety in our Country. Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!

"The president’s remarks come on the heels of two recent mass shootings that took place less than one day apart. On Saturday, a gunman opened fire in a Walmart shopping complex in El Paso, Texas, murdering at least 20 individuals and injuring more than two dozen others. A second attacker took the lives of nine people and injured nearly 30 others after he gunned down people in a Dayton, Ohio bar early Sunday morning.

"Democratic lawmakers and the news media have repeatedly accused the president of stoking racism and inciting violence since taking office. Only hours after the first shooting garnered national attention, the left-wing of the aisle began to point fingers at Trump for causing the tragedy." . . .

Never trust CNN: School shooting survivor: CNN told me to stick to script
"Parkland, Fla. student Colton Haab says he pulled out of a CNN town hall on gun control because producers re-worded and wrote out his question for him"

Mass murderers: tools of the left

2020 Dems Rush to Blame Trump for 'White Supremacy' After El Paso Shooting

. . . "While Trump has warned about an "invasion" of illegal immigrants (a defensible comparison given the large volume of recent migrants), the terrorist mass shooter in El Paso seems to have had his own agenda independent from the president's rhetoric.
"The manifesto, which has been confirmed by local authorities, "criticized both Democrats and Republicans and expressed anti-government and anti-corporate views. The author claimed to have developed those beliefs before Trump’s presidency," NBC News reported."


Politicizing Murder with Lies  "Exploiting the deaths of innocents in El Paso and Dayton for political gain."

"The bodies in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton were still in the morgue when the progressive “carrion-picking crows” started politicizing the murders. But everything they said about gun control, “white nationalism,” and Trump’s culpability was based on lies and stale clichés recycled for political gain." . . .

. . . "Finally, the Democrats’ habit of using mass shootings as fodder for their partisan political message is despicable. If they really cared about crimes against “people of color,” they would have long ago been talking about the violence of blacks against black people in the cities they run. It’s shocking moral idiocy that a party continually harping on “racism” ignores the fact that more blacks are murdered in one year than were killed in the whole history of racist violence from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act.

"But as Trump pointed out about Baltimore, that would require the black elite to actually do something for their “brothers” and “sisters” trapped in Blue-State plantations. How much easier, and lucrative, it is to rail against “racism” and marginal “white nationalists,” and to exploit a tragedy in order to demonize a president who has done more for black and Latino Americans than Barack Obama ever did." . . .

The El Paso Blame Game  . . . "Then again, too, Mr. Trump’s is not the only language echoed in that demented document. Start with the title — “The Inconvenient Truth About Me.” Whose language is echoed there? We do not, even for a second, blame Al Gore or advocates of the Green New Deal. Yet the manifesto veers from complaining about a “Hispanic invasion” to railing about how our modern lifestyle is destroying the environment." . . .  CNN is referred to in here...naturally.

Trump again speciously blamed for the insanity of others  "It is hardly a surprise that the leftists in the media and among the Democratic presidential candidates would immediately blame President Trump for the two horrific mass shootings that occurred over thirteen hours on Saturday.  It's what they do.  Having no scruples whatsoever, they jump at every opportunity to malign the president, no matter how specious their accusations. " . . . 
. . . "They all know he de-segregated his elite golf club of Palm Beach.  They know he was pals with Don King, Mike Tyson, even the odious Al Sharpton in the old days.  They all know he is not a racist, but they do not care about the truth.  They only care about defeating the man who is showing them up day after day since he was elected by succeeding." . . .

Dayton Shooter Was A Pro-Satan Leftist Who Supported Warren, Sanders, Antifa And Communism  . . . "And while the media was eager to quickly expose the El Paso shooter as a right-wing extremist with the implication that he is merely following Trump's belligerent rhetoric, only few details had emerged about the Dayton, Ohio shooter although we certainly understand why the mainstream media may not have rushed to make these alleged details public - because according to Heavy.com, the Dayton shooter was an Elizabeth Warren (and Bernie Sanders) supporter who advocated for socialism, communism and supported Antifa." . . .

Playing the Blame Game in El Paso and Dayton; "How can we use social media to avoid mass shootings?"
. . . "And despite CNN’s obsession with “angry, young, white males” as violence-prone mass shooters, what about a general decline in the culture and pluralism, and the sanctioned ridicule of religious values? This has been concomitant with the coarsening of language and pervasive disrespect and incivility: even on our most prestigious college campuses, rampant and promiscuous name-calling (“racist,” “sexist”) long predate Donald Trump. The demonization (e.g., “The Deplorables”) was not a consequence but a cause of Trump’s ascendancy." . . .

CNN's  lemon, Mr. Lemon

Hysteria is rampant, not entirely for humanitarian reasons, but also for politics, especially fanned by the partisan demagogues at CNN. In one interview, presidential candidate and usually childish Beto O’Rourke blames El Paso on the “hatred on Fox News.” 

 CNN’s so-called news anchors and reporters recite predictable talking points as well as ask leading questions, preparatory to, for example, the outburst that “Donald Trump is responsible” for the mass shootings, as the once-temperate Cory Booker proclaims, as did O’Rourke, in the endless bidding war among Democrat candidates, for far-left ideologue.

Confused elderly man Joe Biden offers condolences for ‘tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan’

Thomas Lifson  "We all misspeak from time to time. But with the national spotlight on nothing else but the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, you’d think that Joe Biden would know the locations. But speaking yesterday to a group of supporters at a fundraiser, he wasn’t even close. Emily Larsen reports in the Daily Caller:

Former Vice President Joe Biden misstated the locations of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, while speaking to donors at a high-dollar fundraiser in San Diego on Sunday night.

Biden, 76, mistakenly referred to the shootings as “the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan the day before," but later corrected himself, according to a pool report. Biden seemingly confused Houston for El Paso and Michigan for Ohio when speaking to donors about the shootings.

"This confusion suggests something disturbing about the way Biden’s mind works. Texas is an undifferentiated whole, so Houston and El Paso – 746 road miles apart from each other, one a semi-tropical coastal, worldly, mega-metropolis, the other a high desert (3800 feet) hardscrabble-ish border town – are interchangeable. (I’ve sent time in both cities and they are very, very different in almost every respect, geographically, economically, socially, and ethnically.)  Even worse is Biden’s vague sense of the industrial Midwest, moving Dayton, Ohio to Michigan." . . .

National Review

If Trump’s To Blame For El Paso Shooting, Is Warren To Blame For Dayton?

Issues & Insights

"As night follows day, the two horribly tragic mass shootings have Democrats pointing fingers of blame at President Trump. Except one shooter, in addition to being a white supremacist, was also an anti-corporatist environmentalist who backs universal health care, and the other was a leftist supporter of Elizabeth Warren. Trying to pin the blame for these maniacs’ murderous actions on any one person, other than the shooter, is political opportunism at its worst.
"Beto O’Rourke jumped in on Sunday, declaring that Trump was responsible for the shooting in El Paso, Texas, which claimed 20 lives and injured 26 more. O’Rourke declared that Trump “is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country. And it does not just offend our sensibilities, it fundamentally changes the character of this country, and it leads to violence.”

O’Rourke went on to claim that “We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years during an administration where you have a president who’s called Mexicans rapists and criminals.”
"O’Rourke is hardly the only one blaming Trump. Critics instantly seized on a manifesto allegedly penned by the suspected shooter, in which he complains about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” to link the shooting to Trump.
"Princeton professor Eddie Glaude said on “Meet the Press” that “Hispanic invasion” is “almost the exact same language of the president of the United States.”
"But assuming that manifesto — posted on the Drudge Report — is credible, the person who wrote it also happens to share many policy positions with Democrats. He’s mad about the environment, he wants universal health care, he hates big corporations and job-killing automation.
"The manifesto, for example, complains that “our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heaing (sic) the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over harvesting resources.” . . .