As expected, WorldNetDaily was quick to politically exploit today’s mass shooting in Virginia that injured Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and others.
An article by Leo Hohmann made sure to highlight that the alleged shooter, James Hodgkinson, was a “supporter and campaign volunteer of Bernie Sanders” who liked “far-left political organizations like, um, Right Wing Watch and Media Matters and was “an admirer of former President Obama.”
That was joined by an article by Joe Wilson that focused on how Hodgkinson “apparently was a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which nearly five years ago was linked to a domestic terror attack at the Washington office of the Family Research Council.” Never mind that the two incidents have nothing whatsoever to do with each other and WND is simply playing guilt by association.
Guilt by association, of course, was something WND utterly refused to do regarding Dylann Roof’s 2015 massacre of nine blacks in a South Carolina church — presumably because it would have been the one that looked guilty. As we documented, Roof’s views on blacks mirrored that of WND authors like Colin Flaherty and Jack Cashill, and his love of apartheid-era South Africa echoed that of then-WND columnist Ilana Mercer (and, more recently, WND author Alex Newman).
But WND refused to explore that aspect of Roof — instead, it rushed to dismiss him as a mentally ill drug abuser, and Cashill doubted Roof’s ability to write the hateful manifesto attributed to him.
No talk of drugs or mental illness regarding Hodgkinson so far at WND. That would ruin its narrative that he was driven by left-wing ideology.