Whenever America is stricken by a tragedy like Wednesday’s shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, which left GOP House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others injured, it is inevitably followed by a public discourse on which of our constitutional rights is to blame. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe predictably blamed the right of the people to keep and bear arms, saying, “There are too many guns on the street.”

No, Gov. McAuliffe, a gun didn’t get hopped up on left-wing rhetoric and start specifically targeting Republican congressmen. Progressive leftist James Hodgkinson did.

And he appears to have been fueled by left-wing rhetoric. The guy posted online about how much he hates Republicans, he reportedly asked Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) whether the players on the field were Republicans or Democrats, and then — after confirming they were Republicans — he started shooting.

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“Republicans hate women, minorities, working class people, & most all (99%) of the people of the country,” Hodgkinson posted on Facebook,

Where did he get those ideas? Probably from Slate, Huffington Post, MSNBC, and all the far left-wing, tin-foil-hat sources from which he posted articles. And probably from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose likeness he used for his Facebook cover picture.

They’ve spent years branding Republicans as xenophobic because most in the GOP want our immigration laws — among the most generous on Earth — to be followed. Racist for believing the welfare state is destructive. Sexist for being against abortion. A basket of deplorables for wanting lower taxes, better trade deals, and vetting of refugees. And so on. And so on. They’ve compared Republicans to suicide bombers, hostage-takers, and Nazis.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren threatened that “people will die” if the GOP health care bill gets passed into law.

Now they constantly insinuate that the president is in cahoots with Russia and that democracy might not survive his presidency.

I’ve been writing about this brand of apocalyptic journalism for months.

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Judging from his Facebook page, James Hodgkinson was a fake news junkie. He was constantly posting apocalyptic, end-of-democracy, left-wing hate narratives — the kind that fuel the CNN/MSNBC 24-hour-news cycle. He posted an article of host Joe Scarborough saying on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “There was only one person on election day— when Americans went to vote— that was under investigation by the FBI.” He said that person wasn’t Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Except that isn’t true and is just one of many debunked fake news myths.

He posted an MSNBC article that suggested Trump may have given “Russian officials classified secrets on purpose because he’s in league with them” and provided not one word of evidence to back up such an outrageous accusation.

It’s not a stretch to say Hodgkinson probably believed he’d be doing a good thing for the country by getting rid of some Republicans.

But, having said all that, this isn’t the First Amendment’s fault, either. CNN is free to fill the airwaves with evidence-free stories about what a mustache-twirling villain President Trump is. The rest of the fake-news media are free to publish their anonymous source stories, which fired FBI Director James Comey testified were often untrue: “The challenge — and I’m not picking on reporters—about writing stories about classified information, is that people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on.”

Kathy Griffin is free to post images of herself holding the president’s decapitated head. The Public Theater is free to produce its assassination-porn bastardization of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Bernie Sanders is free to call his Orwellian nightmare of a movement a “revolution.” Democrats are free to claim people will die every time a Congressional vote doesn’t go their way. And the Democrats are free to villainize Republicans ad nauseam.

Luckily, the First Amendment also provides me the right to say that all this villainizing matters and that because of it, James Hodgkinson clearly believed Republicans were villains who deserved to be shot.

Hodgkinson thought he was fighting against fascism. A guy who tried to gun down the country’s Republican leaders because he didn’t like their ideas thought he was fighting fascism. One of his Facebook posts read, “Founding fathers would hate what our Democracy has morphed into. We now have an aristocracy, a corporatocracy, & an oligarchy, & a plutocracy. This turns our country into a fascist state! Vote blue, it’s right for you!”

He thought he was an anti-fascist, but he was the fascist. He was mad at people for being intolerant, but he shot Republicans for disagreeing with him. (go to page 2 to continue reading)[lz_pagination]