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The First Son, like his father, loves to pass the buck.
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Rather than acknowledge that the Republican Party’s NRA-backed policies have resulted in an epidemic of mass shootings unrivaled in any other wealthy nation, Trump Jr. “liked” a far-right columnist’s crazed tweet blaming the FBI for yesterday’s tragic high school shooting in Florida that resulted in 17 deaths and numerous other grave injuries.
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Donald Trump Jr appears to have liked a tweet blaming the FBI for being ‘too busy trying to undermine the president’ to prevent the Florida shooting. pic.twitter.com/UiBoRIOsnQ
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) February 15, 2018
President Trump, who last year signed a bill making it easier for mentally ill people to access guns, offered the standard NRA talking points, namely, “prayers and condolences.”
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Meanwhile, Don Jr. adhered to the credo, “Let no crisis go unexploited,” by turning the massacre of teens into an opportunity to up the ante on his father’s political war against the FBI.
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Trump Sr. has launched a coordinated smear campaign against the FBI and everyone else investigating his conspiracy with Russia to shift the 2016 presidential election in his favor in exchange for lifting sanctions.
Now, his son is politicizing the tragic deaths of children to score points against his political foes in the Tump family’s ongoing obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation.
Meanwhile, the columnist Trump Jr. endorsed, Kurt Schlichter, is a wingnut conspiracy theorist who wrote a novel, People’s Republic, that fantasized about a far-right vigilante waging a one-man war on the liberal city of Los Angeles.
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Propaganda like Schlichter’s fuels white nationalist violence like that committed in Florida yesterday. In fact, acts of domestic terrorism by white men, particularly those radicalized by white nationalism, far outnumber those committed by Muslim extremists.
The president himself tweeted this morning about the massacre, of course leaving out the radicalization of white American men, and the NRA-supported policies that open the door for an endless series of mass shootings.
Without a ban on assault weapons, and bans on mentally ill people, domestic abusers, and terrorists accessing guns, this nation’s most dangerous past times — guns and white supremacy — will only further imperil its future.
Blaming political enemies, rather than tackling lax gun laws, will do nothing to solve the crisis.
Follow Lucia Brawley on Twitter and at luciabrawley.com.
