Monday, August 05, 2019

EMERGING RIGHT-WING THEORY: "RED FLAG" LAWS WILL BE USED TO SUPPRESS CONSERVATISM

The Hill reports:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Monday that he will introduce bipartisan legislation encouraging states to create "red flag" laws and that President Trump is "very supportive" of the idea.

Graham, in a statement, said he has reached a deal with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on a bill that would start a federal grant program to help and encourage states to create "'red flag' protection order" laws, which are meant to make it easier for law enforcement to identify mentally ill people who should be banned from purchasing guns....

Trump highlighted "red flag" legislation during his speech from the White House on Monday as one of the proposals he would support after the two shootings. He did not discuss gun background check proposals, which are being pushed for by Democrats.
A Free Republic member posts this:
I guess the main red flag is being white

... I guess now that Trump, his liberal daughter and Lindsay Graham, to name 3, all think these shootings were due to whites hating blacks or hispanics, the main focus will be on limiting guns to whites. This new redflag bill, that trump and graham are all fluffed up about, must include white people as the main culprit.

It's like a complete setup; liberal, progressive, wicked losers go out and kill a bunch of people and suddenly....whites are to blame.
A commenter responds:
The “red flag” push would target mostly right-wing extremists (with a few leftists thrown in to give the false appearance of balance) at first, then it would be expanded to include a large portion of the right in general. That’s how these things usually go.

Same goes for the social media crackdown. We’ve already seen it happen on some sites. It will just get worse now.
They already believe that all right-wing online sites are either censored or in the process of being censored, so it's very easy to imagine that they'll begin to form a consensus that red flag laws are an insidious attempt to disarm all True Patriots.

See also Rush Limbaugh, who predicted on the radio today that Trump's rallies will be shut down eventually:
... the first time of any note was, you know, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing. I wake up, Bill Clinton is blaming me. And from that point on and probably prior to that, from that point on, every time one of these things happens, what do we do? We hear the initial report and we’re just devastated. We hate it. We hate that this is happening to our country.

Then the next thing that happens is we have to hear that we, because of what we believe, because of our religious values, our political values, that we’re responsible for it. So that begins a cycle of people either cross-blaming or defending themselves. And it’s just a never-ending cycle that does not change. And, as such, we never even get close to the root of this, we never get close to it.

... The first thing that happens, you know Trump’s gonna get blamed, and Trump gets blamed. I’m convinced that if they could, they would stop Trump’s rallies.

... You watch, somebody’s gonna suggest Trump’s rallies not be allowed to happen now because that’s where all this is coming from. Never mind the fact that if you look at the manifesto of the shooter in Dayton you find a total deranged leftist progressive.
Of course Limbaugh thinks Patrick Crusius was a "leftist progressive," because Crusius, according to his manifesto, is skeptical of big business and concerned about the environment -- never mind the white separatism, the fear of the "great replacement," and the dread that America will become "a one-party state" as a result of an increasing number of Hispanic voters ("The Democrat party will own America and they know it"). Oh, and never mind his eight-hour drive to El Paso so he could shoot Hispanics.

Meanwhile, the lead story at Gateway Pundit is "TRUTH IS THE NEW HATE SPEECH: Facebook Blocks Gateway Pundit Article on El Paso Shooter’s Progressive Language":
On Saturday The Gateway Pundit contributor Byron McKeeby pointed out that the shooter was a committed progressive.'

It is clear from his words that he is a PROGRESSIVE white nationalist – what was once defined as a “Nazi.”

This is not to say he’s a Democrat or a Republican, but he is without question a progressive....

But the leftists running Facebook would not allow this story to be posted.

TRUTH is the new hate speech.
Which brings us back where we started: right-wingers whining about their inaccurate, distorted disinformation pieces being censored by social media. The conservative movement thinks downplaying these stories on social media is a totalitarian act of deplatforming -- and now some right-wingers think red flag laws will be applied in an equally "unfair" way.

Of course, we're talking about red flag laws in part because right-wingers don't want anyone to talk about guns after mass shootings. We've been talking about mental health instead, because right-wingers deem that an acceptable post-massacre subject. As it turns out, liberals agree with some conservatives that red flag laws could be very helpful. So now I predict that right-wingers, including the president, will gradually withdraw their endorsement of them. They'll be seen as having a liberal bias.

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