Buttigieg rips NRA’s ‘false God’

Dems, Trump react

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg compared guns to a “false God” on Sunday as he and a slew of officials responded to the deadly back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

“Here’s something to think about this Sunday morning: Is a gun a tool or is it an idol?” the South Bend, Ind., mayor, who served in Afghanistan as a Navy reservist, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Any time I’ve carried or handled a weapon . . . I’ve viewed it as a tool, but if the gun corporation lobby, which is what the NRA is, now has people viewing guns as a thing to be loved, a thing to be protected, a thing that is the source of our freedom and power and a thing to which we are willing to sacrifice human life, isn’t that the definition of a false god?”

President Trump, meanwhile, said he discussed the attacks with Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray and would make a statement at 10 a.m. Monday.

“Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” he said before returning to the White House from a weekend at his Bedminster, NJ, golf resort.

He earlier issued a tweet on the law-enforcement response and another saying “God bless” the people of El Paso and Dayton.

His daughter and adviser, Ivanka, condemned the El Paso shooter’s hateful ideology, tweeting that “white supremacy, like all other forms of terrorism, is an evil that must be eradicated” and urging people to “raise our voices in rejection of these heinous and cowardly acts of hate, terror and violence.”

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso native, responded, “Yes, I do,” when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he thought Trump was a white nationalist.

“We have a problem with white nationalist terrorism in the United States of America today,” the former congressman said.

“These are white men motivated by the kind of fear that this president traffics in,” he added.

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney hit back on ABC’s “This Week,” accusing the 2020 candidate of playing politics. Mulvaney cited the 2017 attack in which a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire on a congressional baseballgame practice, killing a cop and wounding Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and two others, and a rifle-toting man’s attack last month on an immigration detention facility in Tacoma, Wash.

“Here’s the question you could ask Beto ... ‘Look, did anyone blame Bernie Sanders for the congressional baseball game shooting?’ No, I don’t think so,” he said.

“Did anyone blame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the ... crazy guy who tried to blow up the DHS office in Washington state, taking, I think, a homemade bomb and an AR-15 to shoot up what he called a concentration camp, the exact same rhetoric that AOC was using?”

T HE bodies in El Paso were barely cold when Beto O’Rourke started blaming President Trump.

“He is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country . . . We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today,” the failing Democratic presidential candidate told CNN all Saturday night and Sunday.

He likened Trump’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric” to something out of the Third Reich. “He is an open, avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country and this is incredibly dangerous . . .

“Let’s connect the dots here on . . . who is responsible for this right now.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper cut to the chase: “Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?” “Yes, I do,” said Beto. What disgusting opportunism from a man whose first recorded reaction to the news of Saturday’s massacre in his hometown was a weird smile, quickly supressed, a man so lacking in empathy, he once wrote of his teenage fantasy of plowing his car into two children crossing the road.

But when it comes to publicity for his ridiculous presidential bid, he’s never had it so good. CNN can’t get enough of him.

It doesn’t get uglier than scoring political points on the deaths of 20 people.

But we can all play the blame game.

For years, leftists have divided the nation with identity politics and defended the fascist ideology of Islamism. Now they try to offload responsibility for the emergence of its mirror image: white identity politics and the fascist ideology of white supremacy.

In the first sentence of his socalled manifesto, a puerile mishmash of grievance, El Paso killer Patrick Crusius, 21, wrote of his “support for the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” This refers to the terrorist attack on two New Zealand mosques in March by Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, now glorified as “St. Tarrant” in online forums such as 8chan, where Crusius’ manifesto was posted.

Like Tarrant, Crusius has read the 2011 book “The Great Replacement” by French author Renaud Camus, which claims “elites” are complicit in replacing white Europeans with non-Europeans across the West. This is the driving philosophy of white supremacists.

The problem is that these bad ideas, buttressed by cherry-picked factoids, have been driven out of the public marketplace to dark places underground, where there is no moderating influence.

When media commentators like MSNBC’s Eddie Glaude ban the term “illegal immigrant,” as he did Sunday, you force those conversations underground. When Democratic leading lights bandy around terms like “racist,” “Nazi” and “Third Reich,” they rob those words of their power and demonize dissent.

Bad ideas should be out in the open where the rest of us can demolish them with good arguments.

Like the Christchurch killer, Crusius espoused an anti-capitalist, anti-people radical green ideology. He rails against farming, oil drilling, plastic, paper towels and “consumer culture.” He sounds like Jay Inslee:

“My whole life, I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.”

He justifies murder as “the logical step . . . to decrease the number of people in America using resources.”

So, since we’re playing the blame game, how about all those climate alarmist Democrats on the debate stage last week warning of a looming environmental Armageddon any chance they get.

Their doomsday rhetoric creates an atmosphere of nihilism that makes vulnerable young men despair. Yet we don’t accuse them of having blood on their hands.

We simply don’t know why Crusius, or Connor Betts, the 24-yearold killer at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, a few hours later, chose the path of hatred and bloodshed.

What we do know is that, like other shooters, Crusius’ childhood was marred by his parents’ marital dysfunction. His father, Bryan, reportedly has written a memoir about his four decades of drug and alcohol addiction, which led to his second wife throwing him out of the house when his son was 12.

We also know from the El Paso killer’s LinkedIn page that, like the Christchurch killer, he spent an inordinate amount of time online, “about 8 hours every day.”

The fact is there are lots of problems in our society: family breakdowns, drug addiction, gaming addiction, angry young men, mental illness, a suicide epidemic. But you can’t fix root causes overnight.

What you can change right now is access to battlefield weapons. The El Paso killer’s manifesto makes that clear. He wanted to use an AR-15 “if I get one” but used what he could get, a “civilian” AK-47, along with the bullets chosen for maximum damage.

At the very least, battlefield weapons should be impossible to procure for someone under 25, when the rational part of the brain has not yet fully developed.

So, rather than engaging in empty blame games about the “racist” in the White House, thoughtful politicians on both sides should do the job the American people expect them to do: Come together and figure out how to stop this scourge.