Yesterday, at 6:03 p.m., a reporter with Annapolis, Maryland's Capital Gazette tweeted, "We … don’t know anything about motive in this incident" — the "incident" being the gruesome shooting of seven of the newspaper's employees, five dead. Later it would be revealed that the shooter was one Jarrod Ramos, whose motive was disgruntlement with what he claimed was the paper's defamation of, ironically enough, his "character."
The lag in news as to motive didn't stop the plucky reporters at Fox News, however, from looking for something spectacularly political on a national level. The network's Trace Gallagher informed anchor Neil Cavuto, "We checked in earlier, Neil, with the ideological bent of the Capital…. Doesn’t really seem to have a major ideological bent, if that plays into the motive at all." So, no evident "ideological bent," but hope remained. (Later, Cavuto rather responsibly shut down that line of investigation. "Eyeing through it on the Internet," he reported, "I don’t notice any rabid editorials or polarizing coverage. It just seems like a very solid local paper.")
Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported, "The far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos" decided this was a superb time for some political "humor," which, in Milo's case, entailed this message to reporters everywhere: "I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight." (After all, according to the president of the United States, journalists are "the enemy of the people," hence Milo was just being a Trumpian patriot.) Subsequently he claimed that his message was "a 'joke' that was never meant to be widely distributed." What a wag.
Still, not to be outdone — not even by the psychotic version of Milo Minderbinder — Fox News' Sean Hannity, in possession of no relevant information whatsoever, vomited this on his radio program:
"It's so sad that there are so many sick, demented, and evil people in this world. It really is sad…. You know, as I've always said, I mean honestly — I've been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine [Waters]? You want people to create — 'call your friends, get in their faces,' and Obama said that too. 'Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls,' and wherever else she said."
That there was zero association between Rep. Waters' encouragement of nonphysical protests and a deranged 38-year-old male shooter bothered Mr. Hannity not. But, that's his m.o.; he conjures fantasies and ignores reality — the latter being, most recently, what his BFF said Wednesday night at his North Dakota rally: "Maxine. She’s a beauty. I mean, she practically was telling people the other day to assault [untrue]. Can you imagine if I said the things she said?"
The NY Times: "Trump is wrong that he, himself, has never encouraged violence. During the 2016 campaign, he urged his supporters to 'rough up' protesters, lamented the 'old days' when protesters would be 'carried out on a stretcher' and explicitly told supporters to 'knock the crap out of them.'"
I'm beginning to have visions of Weimar Republic street brawls in Annapolis, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Donald Trump's fascistic proclivities become more evident each day, and there is no extant force to curb his appetite for ever greater power. When a shooting at a medium-market newspaper evolves, in minutes, to the sensationalist far-right level of a Reichstag fire, it seems ever more manifest that the forces of power that do exist will stop at nothing to crush all democratic opposition.