On Morning Joe — their first show since the Saturday night shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner — they spent just 2 minutes and 26 seconds of their 4-hour show discussing why the shooter carried out his attack.
This video clip shows everything they said about his motive.
Jonathan Lemire asked Ken Dilanian:
“Ken, tell us what we know about the suspect here. The person that Mika just identified, the police have in custody, what may have motivated him? What has he said or written? What can you tell us about why he did this?”
Instead of leading with the shooter’s own words from the manifesto, Ken started by calling it “really extraordinary” and launched into a list of the shooter’s accomplishments.
He said:
“Jonathan, it’s really extraordinary. This is a person who attended one of the most prestigious STEM universities in the country, California Institute of Technology, Caltech, got an engineering undergrad degree, got a master’s in computer science, and was working, as Mika said early on, as a part-time teacher. But he described himself as a game developer.
You can find video online of him touting a wheelchair invention that allowed wheelchairs to be more stable. This was an accomplished, articulate person with a loving family apparently, who went down a path of radicalization.
And the reason we know that is he’s written a thousand-word document where he describes exactly why he did this. And he describes President Trump as a pedophile and a race, uh, rapist.”
After hearing this, what did viewers think his motive was?
Ken said the shooter has “written a thousand-word document where he describes exactly why he did this,” he then immediately added that the shooter “describes President Trump as a pedophile and a rapist.”
He continued by saying he was targeting Trump administration officials, apologized to his family, and that there was some evidence he attended or was associated with a No Kings protest.
They called it radicalization on the far-left fringes, a “world of unreality” bombarded by conspiracy theories, and linked it to a broader climate of political violence not seen since the 1960s.
But that was the end of it.
Then the show quickly pivoted to Iran. And two hours later, Morning Joe played this exact clip and segment all over again!
What about his education? This was not some isolated person with no access to information. He was highly educated. He had a master’s degree. So what ideas was he taught? What worldview was he absorbing? Did anyone on MS NOW bother asking whether his education shaped the way he saw politics, power, and violence?
He was also described as a video game developer. What games did he play? Did he play Call of Duty and other shooter games? What kind of movies and TV shows did he watch?
Was he desensitized to violence by video games, movies, and TV?
Did the news channels he watch constantly reinforce the idea that Trump was a threat that needed to be stopped?
Morning Joe will never ask any of these questions, because asking them honestly might lead to the real motive — and that doesn’t fit their narrative.
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