Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana
I see the strong and self-evident need to clarify that membership in something as loose and as non-cohesive as any particular Facebook Group (like Terminate the Republican Party, which I was a member of, and yet am about to withdraw from), doesn't really mean you ascribe to the deranged views of someone as disturbed as the attempted Congressional assassin.
Like Bernie Sanders' speech on the Senate floor this afternoon made clear, I also do not condone any kind of violence, national or international, and can only hope Congressman Scalise has a very quick recovery from his bullet wound in the hip. He is presently in critical condition.
Perhaps the bullet hit or nicked one of his major arteries in the leg, like the femoral artery.
I don't see the hostility and rage engendered by Trump's presidency subsiding but, in fact and by necessity, it must. Violence never solves anything. Gandhi made that clear 80 years ago. We don't need armed camps in the United States, revenge shootings, and quasi-Civil War in this nation, not at all!
I joined this group to find out more about it, and in fact never spent more than a total of fifteen minutes over a six month period reading any of its posts, most of which I found somewhat boring and repetitive and only occasionally inflammatory.
I have joined 1090 Facebook groups out of curiosity and as a way of spreading out articles I think important enough to read, certainly including my own.
I know enough about the lynch mob/spook/national security mentalities, especially on pages like the Patriot and Breitbart News, to surmise that there will be some calls for investigation, both from the FBI and from journalists, into that particular Facebook group, and probably others, to ferret out future assassins like the lunatic who shot at the Congressmen this morning, who is now mercifully no longer among the living.
I don't write much about politics anymore but I do find it necessary to clarify these above points.
I posted a shortened version of this on the Terminate the Republican Party page just before I left, and someone already responded that leaving the group was tantamount to "running away and hiding." I really don't think so, but even if it were hiding ideologically, so be it. There are some nasty folks out there who will really press to make hay out of this almost random connection to Facebook groups.
I am the creator of a Facebook group, Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Win in 2020, and a moderator of another one, Take Back the Democratic Party and America, so I know what I am talking about. Facebook makes a strange effort at "auto-reporting" posts they consider objectionable, but frankly, I think this "auto-reporting" is done by a bunch of algorithm robots. Anyone have any insights on that?
In any case, I hope this tragic event this morning will lead people to the conference tables of America to work things out and not shoot things out.
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