Rolling Stone makes enormous leap in piece on Buffalo shooter

May 20, 2022

By Tim Worstall

Rolling Stone insists that a maniac with a gun who murders 10 is a mainstream Republican. This tells us rather more about where Rolling Stone is starting from than it does about anything else useful.

No, really, they’ve gone with it. Its headline: “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.”

The reason for this, as their subhead puts it, is that the “right-wing extremists who control the modern GOP are all gripped by a racist delusion. The shooter is just the latest to act on it,” according to the piece.

“There’s no such thing as a lone wolf — an appellation often given, in error, to terrorists who act alone, particularly those of the white supremacist variety. There are only those people who, fed a steady diet of violent propaganda and stochastic terror, take annihilatory rhetoric to its logical conclusion.”

We can probably write, in our sleep, the rest of this. You can, that is, not just us. Republicans might talk about that, you know, just possibly, unlimited immigration isn’t all that clever an idea and this means that anyone who falls over the edge into actual terrorism is, in fact, a Republican. Because shooting people for being non-white just is the same thing as thinking about the sensible, appropriate, level of immigration, isn’t it? Exactly the same.

So, we get the Great Replacement Theory mentioned, which as we’ve already pointed out is now said to be “intellectually adjacent” to thinking about immigration. That means that, that “adjacent”, that the one can be dismissed as being mere ravings because the other is. We can even note that much of the progressive press has been salivating over how America is about to become a majority minority nation for a decade and more now.

This isn’t to say that one set of these ideas is good, the other bad – although obviously shooting people is indeed bad – nor even that one set is true the other isn’t. It is to insist that they’re both rather the same idea and  yet we have the progressive media welcoming it using one description and despising it using the other. The same idea of being good or bad depends upon who says it is indeed bias, which is the thing we are about here. The descendants of European whites are about to become not-any-more the majority of Americans. That is that majority minority idea. As this article in Rolling Stone itself actually says.

But then comes that leap in that headline. Thinking about this, worrying about it even, is the same – because “mainstream” right? –  as getting a gun and shooting people over it? No, really, just no. Just as desiring a continued child tax credit is not the same as blowing people up like the Weathermen did in the name of greater economic equality.

Rolling Stone is listed as No. 12 in one sector of the American media. It gains some 24 million visits a month from that position. Sure, the music business has rarely been right-wing, despite its capitalist red in tooth and claw nature. But still, this is taking progressive positioning too far.

The equation of mass murder with “mainstream Republican” is not an attempt at a mature or even reasonable comparison. It’s a deliberate attempt to put “mainstream Republican” outside the set of allowable positions that can be righteously held. That’s what the bias is, a deliberate painting of the opposition as being beyond allowable opinion.

Oh, have we said there’s an election coming?

 

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