{"id":1750,"date":"2017-10-12T20:58:26","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T00:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1750"},"modified":"2017-10-12T20:58:26","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T00:58:26","slug":"las-vegas-shooting-age-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2017\/10\/las-vegas-shooting-age-trump.html","title":{"rendered":"The Las Vegas Shooting in the Age of Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

As of this writing, it has been a little more than a week since Stephen Paddock opened fired on some 22,000 attendees at a country music concert in Las Vegas, murdering 58 and hospitalizing over 500 more.<\/p>\n

Shortly before Paddock began spraying the crowd with bullets, those in attendance were waving American flags while singing \u201cGod Bless America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had an impartial spectator not known better, he could be forgiven for confusing this event with a Trump rally.<\/p>\n

And this is the point:<\/p>\n

While the public has not yet been made privy to any information regarding Paddock\u2019s subjective intentions on the evening that his name became synonymous with evil, there is one basic fact on which partisans from across the political spectrum seem to be in total agreement.\u00a0 Whether Paddock\u2014like Democrat mass shooter and Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, who deliberately and methodically attempted to assassinate Republican Congress members on a Virginia baseball field a few months back\u2014meant<\/em> to slaughter Republican voters, he did in point of fact slaughter people who, undoubtedly, were predominantly Republican voters.<\/p>\n

They were Red Staters, Deplorables, who came under attack in Vegas.<\/p>\n

That the Democratic left understood this was gotten readily enough from the remarks made by any<\/a> number<\/a> of commentators, from CNN to CBS.\u00a0 On social media, leftists tweeted expressions of joy over the fact that likely Trump supporters were targeted, and a CBS legal executive wrote on Facebook that she had no sympathy with the victims because of their political affiliation.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the predominantly (though not exclusively) white men and women who sported American attire, paid homage to veterans, and sang \u201cGod Bless America;\u201d those young men who saw their girlfriends to safety, refused to leave the sides of the wounded, dove in front of young ladies, total strangers, to shield them from the gunfire that Paddock was raining down upon them, and who ran back into the thick of battle to help others\u2014those who one writer<\/a> recently described as \u201cthe people who make America great\u201d\u2014never attended a Black Lives Matter event.<\/p>\n

They never tried to shut down speakers with whom they disagree, never shouted, \u201cF**k the Police!\u201d or covered their faces in masks while assaulting those who they accused of being \u201cracists\u201d and \u201cfascists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The men and women at that country music concert in Vegas would be neither interested in attending nor welcomed at the Democratic National Convention.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t read The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Slate, <\/em>or The Huffington Post.<\/em><\/p>\n

They don\u2019t watch CNN <\/em>or MSNBC. <\/em><\/p>\n

And you can take it to the bank that they wouldn\u2019t remotely think<\/em> of burning the American flag, much less do it.<\/p>\n

They would never \u201ctake a knee\u201d during the playing of the national anthem.<\/p>\n

Much less would they take to the streets and march under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, the symbol of one of history\u2019s deadliest ideologies.<\/p>\n

These<\/em> are the people who scumbag extraordinaire Stephen Paddock decided he was going to massacre.<\/p>\n

Telling indeed has been the readiness of left-leaning commentators to steer the narrative over \u201cthe largest mass shooting in American history\u201d away from this bedrock fact.\u00a0 Leftists, rather, don\u2019t want for their ideology and party to in any way be linked to a despicable excuse-for-a-man that is responsible for conducting a historically unprecedented mass shooting.<\/p>\n

However, Paddock\u2019s subjective intentions notwithstanding\u2014whether he was an ISIS terrorist, a madman in search of notoriety, a victim suffering from a brain tumor or \u201cmental illness,\u201d a Russian agent deployed by the Kremlin, or a radicalized recruit to the anti-Trump \u201cResistance\u201d\u2014the left in D.C., the national media, academia, and Hollywood cannot sever their toxic rhetoric from the Las Vegas mass massacre.<\/p>\n

Those on the left (and even a number of people who are not doctrinaire leftists) are forever insisting that if contemporary human acts and events are to be understood, it is intellectually and morally shallow to treat them independently of the larger historical-cultural contexts in which they transpire.\u00a0 We hear this refrain most commonly when it comes to race-related events.\u00a0 So, astronomical rates of black criminality, say, or equally scandalous rates of illegitimacy among black Americans are routinely explained in terms of events\u2014like slavery\u2014that occurred centuries ago.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, events like riots in Baltimore or Ferguson are depicted as a response to the \u201coppression\u201d to which the rioters are said to be subjected, and this contemporary oppression is fitted into a narrative of oppression that extends back centuries.<\/p>\n

However, in this <\/em>case, the politically inconvenient nature of the demographic that was targeted renders consideration of context unnecessary for the usual suspects.\u00a0 Yet the context here is indeed explanatory, and the narrative within which this shooting occurred is eminently more plausible than such narratives as \u201cthe legacy of slavery,\u201d \u201cthe patriarchy,\u201d and other left-wing tales.<\/p>\n

The narrative within which Stephen Paddock must be located is that of a culture of sheer, poisonous hatred of all things Trump\u2014including and especially his supporters. Democratic politicians, their apologists in the Fake News media, their donors among Hollywood entertainers, the academics that develop the intellectual scaffolding for their policies, the late-night buffoons that mock their opponents, and the leftist street thugs that are the strong-arm wing of their \u201cResistance\u201d movement\u2014all have spent nearly the last two years subjecting Trump and his supporters to a campaign of demonization, of dehumanization.<\/p>\n

Trump supporters\u2014men; women; young teens; the elderly; and veterans\u2014have been ridiculed, harassed, written off as \u201cdeplorables\u201d; and beaten with a wide range of weaponry.\u00a0 Antifa (\u201cAntifascist\u201d) groups have obtained guns.\u00a0 In June, this environment of hatred and violence boiled over onto a baseball field in Virginia when fanatical leftist and avid MSNBC consumer Hodgkinson went hunting for Republican members of Congress.<\/p>\n

Again, Stephen Paddock may not have gunned down likely Trump supporters because <\/em>they were Trump supporters. Or maybe this is exactly why he selected the target that he did. In any event, it is intellectually dishonest to assess this mass shooting in isolation from the anti-Trump violence and incendiary rhetoric that the Democrats and their \u201cResistance\u201d have been purveying for the last two years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As of this writing, it has been a little more than a week since Stephen Paddock opened fired on some 22,000 attendees at a country music concert in Las Vegas, murdering 58 and hospitalizing over 500 more. 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