National Public Radio claimed Tuesday that President Donald Trump was responsible for inspiring mass shootings in the United States, and that he ought to have acknowledged his culpability in his White House speech on Monday.
In an article marked “analysis” at taxpayer-funded NPR’s website, titled “Trump Left A Lot Unsaid About Mass Shootings, Domestic Terrorism — And His Own Words,” Domenico Montanaro cited various experts to argue that the factors that President Trump cited in mass shootings — including mental health — were not, in fact, causes.
However, Montanaro said, Trump’s own rhetoric was a cause of mass shootings. He offered no expert analysis or scientific evidence, other than the opinion of a left-wing former official who authored an infamous report early in the Obama administration that suggested veterans returning from war were a national security threat.
Montanaro argued that simply using words like “invasion” to describe the arrival of thousands of migrants at the border each week was a cause of mass shootings because people like the El Paso, Texas, shooter used similar language.
Monataro’s explanation also deliberately obscured any distinction between legal and illegal immigrants:
Yet Trump has faced sharp criticism for his own comments, particularly about immigrants, from the inception of his political rise.
In just the past year, Trump has used the word “invasion” or “invade” in tweets 10 times to refer to immigrants.
The NPR author did not acknowledge that the El Paso shooter wrote explicitly in his manifesto that he had arrived at his opinions before Trump arrived on the national political scene, directly contradicting Montanaro’s “analysis.”
NPR has never attempted to establish a causal link between President Barack Obama’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement and several murders of police officers, including a mass shooting in Dallas in 2016.
Nor is there any record of NPR blaming Obama’s rhetoric — which at times was fiercely partisan, even accusing opponents of making “common cause” with Iran — for the numerous other mass shootings that occurred on his watch.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.