The Washington Post recently peddled a false left-wing claim about the Tucson mass shooting. This claim was recognized as baseless long ago even by many liberal journalists. The Post claimed that the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) was inspired by a right-wing mob. As Hot Air notes, the claim was made by “Paul Kane, who’s spent years covering Congress for Washington’s most prestigious newspaper.”
Kane retracted this claim, but only after it had been retweeted by many other progressives. He retracted it only in the face of immediate protests from readers. One noted that Kane’s claim was contradicted by one of The Post’s own op-eds from years ago, when The Post was less left-wing than it is today.
In reality, Giffords, who survived, was not targeted based on her ideology. She was shot in a mass shooting that also took the life of GOP appointee John Roll, a federal judge. Both of them were shot by a bizarre loner, Jared Loughner, who was not a conservative and did not follow conservatives such as Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. One of Loughner’s favorite books was The Communist Manifesto.
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But political ideology likely played no role in Loughner’s shooting of Giffords and Roll. Instead, Loughner may have been motivated by his bizarre obsessions with things like grammar. He said the government was engaged in “mind control” and sought to “brainwash” the public “by controlling grammar.”
The Washington Post has repeatedly published false claims about mass shootings. On March 29, 2013, it published a racist, hate-filled op-ed by Charlotte and Harriet Childress. They falsely claimed that “nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years … have been committed by white men and boys.” The Post published this op-ed even though most of the mass killings in the Washington Post’s own region have been committed by minorities — such as Beltway Sniper John Muhammad.
As another LU writer noted in the Philly News at the time:
Mass killings have also been committed by nonwhites, such as Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, Beltway sniper John Muhammad, Long Island Rail Road shooter Colin Ferguson, and Wisconsin’s Chai Soua Vang.
That LU writer also sent a letter to the Washington Post taking issue with this false claim, which The Post refused to publish.
In reality, mass killers are not disproportionately white. Even unfailingly liberal Slate, which used to be owned by the Washington Post, has pointed out that “mass shooters aren’t disproportionately white.” As Slate’s Daniel Engber noted in 2017, “white people weren’t over-represented among mass shooters.” Given that 77% of all Americans are white, it is not surprising that mass shooters are also often white.
The Washington Post still has not corrected the erroneous legal definition of sexual assault or the false claim it made about the scope of federal evidence rules that we discussed earlier, even though the errors were brought to its attention by a Washington Post reader who sent an email about the errors to a Post editor and three of its staffers.
Although the Washington Post cannot find the time to fix its errors or get its basic facts right about highly publicized mass shootings, it did have the time to publish a hate-filled, empty-headed, bigoted rant from a left-wing retired professor. “I hate all men and wish they were dead,” she wrote in the Washington Post, boasting of what she said to her loving and long-suffering husband to show that “there is nothing small about women’s rage these days.” The author is Victoria Bissell Brown, a retired history professor at Grinnell College. The Post gave her a soapbox today to spew hate and vitriol, even as it is trimming coverage of local news and ignoring readers’ complaints about factual errors.
Her husband, a progressive like her, sounds like a respectful, long-suffering doormat who did nothing to provoke her rage. As Professor Brown herself admits:
[I]t occurred to me to be grateful that I’m married to a man who will listen. … As my rage rushed through the streets of my mind, toppling every memory of every good thing my husband has ever done (and there are scores of memories), I said. …to him: Don’t you dare sit there and sympathetically promise to change. … No, I said, you can’t change. You are unable to change. You don’t have the skills and you won’t do it. … You respect women, you believe in women, you like women, you don’t hit women or rape women or in any way abuse women. You have applauded and funded feminism for a half-century. You are one of the good men. And you cannot change. You can listen all you want, but that will not create one iota of change.
She plainly doesn’t regret the fact that she “announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead.” Neither does the Washington Post, which has contempt for many of its readers.
