Linn testified that he got “riled up” by Fox News and right wing talk radio, drank 45 beers, and set fire to the mosque’s prayer room because he learned from Fox that Muslims are terrorists who don’t believe in Jesus Christ: Mosque Arsonist Tells Court: ‘I Only Know What I Hear on Fox News’.
Linn explained to the court that he had gotten “riled up” after watching Fox News.
“And I was more sad when Judge [Jack] Zouhary asked him that, ‘Do you know any Muslims or do you know what Islam is?’” one mosque member who attended the hearing recalled to WNWO. “And he said, ‘No, I only know what I hear on Fox News and what I hear on radio.’”
“Muslims are killing Americans and trying to blow stuff up,” Linn also reportedly told the judge. “Most Muslims are terrorists and don’t believe in Jesus Christ.”
Linn claimed that he had consumed 45 beers in the 6 hours before leaving his Indiana home to set fire to the mosque, which he had discovered while working as a truck driver.
After his arrest on Oct. 2, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ava Dusten said that Linn had told officers, “Fuck those Muslims… They would kill us if they got the chance.”
As the details pour out, it feels like déjà vu: The young, angry white man, the innocent children, the terror, the powerlessness and frenzy the parents feel, the mental block and deep, deep sadness of all the rest of us trying to process unimaginable horror. And then, the desperate pleas from average citizens to stop making this such a terribly easy crime to commit.
A few randomly plucked comments from this New York Times initial report on the massacre give you an idea of the general feeling:
Suspend the constitution, conduct door-to-door searches of EVERY private residence in the United States and confiscate ALL guns – YES, rifles too! And then melt them ALL down.
We need to restrict movies, TV, and video games that glorify violence.
Do any of you honestly believe that there could have been anything done by this sleepy, little Connecticut town to prevent something like this from ever happening? Connecticut is already among the top five states with the most strict gun control laws, among the lowest for gun crime, and yet something like this still happened. The fact is that the man was a killer and if someone ever crosses a threshold to kill on a scale as this man had, then they would find a way to do it.
First the horror, then the compassion for the victims, the families. Then the rage against a people for whom having and using guns is a national pastime. How many senseless killings will it takes for the nation to awaken and revolt against the barbaric NRA type neanderthals running amok in the streets of America.
Every incidence of a shooting in a public place makes me more and more frustrated that we can’t have a serious political discussion about guns.
I feel such sadness for the children and their families, yet this is overridden by my anger at the NRA.
It’s really sad that it’s easier for a crazy person to buy a gun than it is to get proper mental healthcare.
What is the tipping point? When will Americans love their children more than they love their guns? How much more? How many more?
Everyone is right to one degree or another. But the answers to those questions, are, of course by now, 31 school shootings later, quite familiar: We are not supposed to talk about policies, but people, pundits and politicians remind us. We are not supposed to blame access to guns, but rather, the unstable individuals who purchase them for harm. We are not supposed to be mad at Hollywood, but rather, the people who cannot tell the difference between real life and the glamorized fantasy portrayed on screen. And we are not supposed to blame those angry, unstable young men, but rather, a mental healthcare system that failed them.
The problem is, none of that gets us any closer to an action to take, a plan to implement. Doing nothing is no longer an option, a frustration now part and parcel of the coverage of these events.
If we simply accept this kind of violence as the new normal, then what? Schools are more than just a vulnerable population of innocents — they are, for some people, symbols of their earliest exposure to the cruelty of fellow humans, badges for their failures, some of their first experiences with alienation, marginalization and the judgment of others.
For the mentally unstable, that symbol has proven to be a particularly irresistible outlet for revenge fantasies. Isn’t it time we regarded schools as the same vulnerable target as airplanes? Why are they not among our nation’s top-guarded entities? Because we simply cannot accept that they are no longer innocent places?
If we will not implement gun control, and will not make mental health a universal, destigmatized resource, then the least we can do is protect the most obvious targets of the mentally unstable people who commit these crimes. Because otherwise, our only choice is to become as jaded to this terrorism as we have to every other “unsolvable” issue in this country, i.e., issue at which we have reached another political, partisan impasse: homelessness, poverty, immigration, sexism, racism. Remember? There was a time all those things floored us too, when all those things seemed like unspeakable horrors. And their continued presence in our every day lives is the price we pay for our complacency.
Catholic Loon Sean Hannity, one of the Fox News channel’s strident crackpot conservative voices.
The NYtimes reports on the way MSNBC has begun creeping up on the conservative news behemoth:
During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.
MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.
But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.
“We’re closer to Fox than we’ve ever been,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who has been trying to overtake Fox for years. “All of this is great for 2013, 2014 to keep building.”
Just as interesting is the critique of Fox from within the conservative movement, particularly younger conservatives like Ross Douthat, who have had enough with the “bubble.”
Today, a story in POLITICO features Douthat and a bunch of young conservatives scolding their elders for buying into the myths Fox perpetuates, and not finding other ways to reach the public:
And this, say next-generation Republicans, is where cocoonism has been detrimental to the cause.
The tension between the profit- and ratings-driven right — call them entertainment-based conservatives — and conservatives focused on ideas (the thinkers) and winning (the operatives) has never been more evident.
The latter group worries that too many on the right are credulous about the former.
“Dick Morris is a joke to every smart conservative in Washington and most every smart conservative under the age of 40 in America,” said Douthat. “The problem is that most of the people watching Dick Morris don’t know that.”
The egghead-hack coalition believes that the entertainment-based conservatives create an atmosphere that enables flawed down-ballot candidates, creates a cartoonish presidential primary and blocks needed policy reforms, and generally leave an odor on the party that turns off swing voters.
It even fosters an atmosphere in which there’s a disconnect with the ostensible party leaders.
Even big-ticket donors have bought into this disconnect, surrounding themselves with Fox news, talk radio and their “apocalyptic” vision. They entered the bubble wiilingly, right along with the party rank and file.
In the Washington Post, there’s a profile of Beth Cox, a member of the GOP faithful who personally bought into the bubble created by the conservative media–now she is devastated by what she sees.
She turned on her computer and pulled up an electoral map that she had filled out a few days before the election. She had predicted the outcome twice — once coming up with a narrow Romney win and once more with a blowout.
Florida: red.
Colorado: red.
Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: all red.
Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed.
Cox recognized that much of the blame lay at her own party’s feet:
She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten “way too white,” she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be “neutralized,” she said, and Romney’s campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about “crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape.”
