“NO MORE BABIES!” the gunman wrote in his manifesto. “Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down!”
These were the demands of James Lee, who, strapped with explosives and a rifle, entered the suburban Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Discovery Channel in September 2010 and took three hostages in a five-hour standoff.
Lee’s crazed manifesto clearly echoes the environmental doomsaying of some of our politicians and many of our journalists. His screed, with the all caps declaration, “MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!” could also have been cribbed from Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who once wrote: “the old civilization defying nature’s balancing has created an overpopulated world, with ‘cold wars’ threatening peaceful existence, for the fit and intelligent adults of our present civilization.”
Just as Sanger called for the uprooting of “human weeds,” Lee’s manifesto cursed “parasitic human infants.”
Environmentalist fearmongering and Sangerism had clearly seeped into Lee’s brain. But the soundest explanation for his attack was probably that Lee was psychotic.
The cause of his rampage was his own mental illness. The rhetoric of environmentalists and anti-natalists helped determine his target — the Discovery Channel — and the text of the manifesto. But there’s no basis for blaming Margaret Sanger or Greenpeace for Lee’s violence. They never justified or extolled actions like his.
These days, some on the Left — journalists, the abortion industry and presidential candidates — want to blame the pro-life movement for a madman’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado.
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said “people have to understand that hateful rhetoric and words and harassment of doctors and harassment of women going to health centers have real implications.”
“I hope people realize that bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences,” wrote Bernie Sanders.
“The war on Planned Parenthood has killed a volunteer pastor of an evangelical church,” wrote Bill Scher, the liberal writer, referring to police officer Garret Swasey, a pro-lifer who died defending the people inside clinic.
Their evidence: a single, anonymous law enforcement source who says that the shooter’s rambling included the four words, “no more baby parts.” Planned Parenthood, which aborts 300,000 babies per year, has been the biotech industry’s leading supplier of human organs — a role recently brought to light by sting videos.
All other evidence cuts against the idea the shooter was some sort of pro-life extremist. “He said a lot of things,” that same source said. He had no known affiliation with the pro-life movement. When he passed out anti-Obama pamphlets, they didn’t mention abortion, according to a New York Times report. The shooter didn’t shoot a single abortionist, Planned Parenthood staffer, or woman seeking an abortion. His first victim was just the man who happened to be standing out front the clinic.
If the abortion lobby and its allies were correct that this indicts the pro-life movement, the American Left would have plenty of shootings to account for.
An Arapahoe High School senior in 2013 killed a fellow student when he came to school hunting down his debate coach. The killer “thought of himself as a liberal,” according to one debate team partner. He “was an aggressive, outspoken, atheist, liberal,” another student said. In Facebook posts, he called himself a “Keynesian.”
Should we blame bile-spewing Keynesian columnists in the mainstream media for “setting a tone” of hatred?
The University of Chicago went on lockdown on Monday because of threats by a local 21-year old, Jabari Dean, who was inspired by the video of a white policeman shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times, killing him. Jabari, in an online forum, promised to “execute approximately 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time McDonald was killed.” Dean wrote “I am to do my part to rid the world of the white devils.”
Which politician or Black Lives Matters activist do we blame for that one?
A man with a gun and a sack of Chick Fil-A sandwiches entered the offices of the Family Research Council in 2012 trying to kill as many people as possible at the conservative organization. After he was thwarted, he told investigators he had targeted FRC because the Southern Poverty Law Center listed FRC as an “anti-gay group.”
What’s the culpability of SPLC, or the columnists and editors who use “anti-gay” to describe everyone who subscribes to the traditional view of marriage?
The shooter at Umpqua Community College in Oregon earlier this year picked out for execution students who were Christian, according to two witness accounts. What penance should we demand of those authors and television hosts who regularly rail against religion, especially Christianity?
The Roanoke shooter who killed two former colleagues cited the mistreatment he claimed to suffer as a gay black man, according to ABC News. Do the scribblers in our identity-politics-grievance industry bear blame?
The 2013 murder of two New York cops seemed to be retaliation for the police killing of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.
Of course, nobody on the Left owes any apology or bears responsibility for these shootings. In each case, the shooter bears responsibility.
Those who inveigh against police abuse, overpopulation, environmental degradation, racism and anti-gay bigotry are responsible only for their arguments. They are not responsible for the actions of every psycho who waves their flag or targets their enemies.
This all seems very obvious — except to some of Planned Parenthood’s allies today.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
