Blood On the Streets Of Squirrel Hill

And today there was another mass shooting this time in a Pittsburgh suburb.

This time a Synagogue. A man with military firepower showed up reportedly shouting "Kill all the Jews" and opened fire. The body count is currently at 8 dead. At least three police officers were shot and wounded, there may well be more wounded (and dying) as well.

For what's been found about the shooter, his social media apparently marked him as a rabid Antisemitic bastard. His recent tweets were about the "Caravan" trump had been ranting against the past few weeks, and how the shooter believed "the Jews" were behind that "invasion" about to doom the entire nation.

In an odd twist, the shooter may have been a Far Right wingnut but he hated trump... because trump had Jews (his son-in-law Jared for example) on his staff. That's right. We're dealing with an asshole who thinks trump isn't enough of an asshole worth his support.

So here's your thread. This entire week (and it's not even over yet) has been one violent attack after another by angry men driven to that edge by Far Right Republican rhetoric.

• Angry White Guy in Kentucky with a history of domestic violence and signs of racism (posting rants against Black Lives Matter) goes off on Wednesday, tried to break into a Black church service, then settled on shooting dead two Blacks at a Kroger store before getting caught. Another White guy in the parking lot heard the shots and pulled his own gun on the murderer, only for the killer to beg mercy because "Whites don't shoot Whites." (THAT is the fucking White Privilege mindset in one goddamn quote)
• Angry White/Filipino Guy with a criminal history who obsesses with being Pro-trump wanted to kill everyone on trump's Enemies List, so he ships off more than a dozen bombs across the nation. Luckily most of the bombs were reportedly intentional duds (a scare tactic), but a handful of them were working when the bomb squads got to defuse them...
• Angry White Guy in Pittsburgh hated Jews, found justification in the Caravan fearmongering, and went on his killing spree.

All three of them with key similarities:

• Anger
• Fear of Diversity, or that the rights of minorities will override the rights ("the superiority of" in their eyes) of White (men)
• History of domestic violence (so far in the first two, the Squirrel Hill shooter's full background hasn't been made public yet. But I'd lay good odds he's got at least one restraining order from an ex-wife/ex-girlfriend)
• Existing within a media bubble of Far Right Narrative (the Kentucky shooter didn't show as much of it, but right now the MAGABomber and the Squirrel Hill shooter are both well-documented in social media thriving in that wingnut bubble)

Like Silverman noted before, which I quoted from yesterday: The rhetoric of the Far Right media - bashing Jews, bashing Blacks, bashing Women, bashing Gays, bashing Liberals, bashing everyone not of the Far Right Tribe - is creating a toxic environment where the most unstable and least-controller fringe members are likely to get "triggered" and turn into killers.

The leaders of the Far Right know what they're doing: they get to fill the airwaves with their Fearmongering - based more on emotional hype than on the facts or reality - to trigger enough idiots listening in, and then get to pose on the mainstream channels to beg off "oh well, it wasn't really what we said" or "free speech, bitches" or "he's just a Lone Wolf, you shouldn't portray an entire mob of Angry White Guys like that."

We have a lot of other things out there that can cause or trigger bad behavior in people: Drugs, violent video games, what have you. We take those things into context when dealing with the monsters who get triggered, and we try to keep those sources out of reach by restricting their sale or access, or at least try to counter with counseling and education.

But how can we counter this unending storm of toxic worldview? The Far Right is riling up their base to commit wholeheartedly to the final stage of a Culture War that means violence upon every minority and "non-person" on their checklist of targets.

This isn't a rehash of 1968. This is a bloody remake of 1860.

God help us.