Has there ever been a better example of liberal overreach than the coverage that followed the shooting in San Bernardino? It started in the immediate aftermath of the attack with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who said: “Yo GOP, kinda hard to talk about ‘keeping people safe’ when your peeps are shooting up America,” and the numerous attempts at “prayer shaming” anyone who offered there “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of the horrific event.
Without waiting to learn the actual facts (which turned out to be that the assailants were radicalized Muslims), Moulitsas didn’t just assume the shooters were Republicans; he also sought to score shameless political points.
Usually a rather marginal figure, Moulitsas set the tone for the next few days. Comparisons between the NRA and ISIS abounded, and the ubiquity of the “prayer shaming” that took place makes one wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of coordinated effort. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, for example, both quickly echoed the “God isn’t fixing this” musings of left-leaning media elites.
But at the very least, it was all a prime example of the kind of groupthink that exists among—not just the Left—but also a certain set of young “mainstream” media types. New York’s Daily News took that line of thought to its natural end point Saturday night when they published an op-ed that blamed one of the shooting victims for his own fate. His offense? Being a conservative “Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew” and a supporter of the NRA.
To be fair, this was the media playbook after the Gabby Giffords shooting, where they also took their lead from Markos.
And of course it was coordinated, just as the NYT’s editorial was almost certainly coordinated with the White House.