On Thursday, Americans were saddened — but not terribly surprised — by news of yet another mass shooting, this one at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
The incident — which left five dead and two others “gravely injured” — comes on the heels of increased mistrust and disdain directed at the nation’s news media.
Ironically, the seeds of contempt have largely been sown by people who are media figures themselves but have been deemed more trustworthy by certain fringe elements due to the fact that they operate outside of the journalistic mainstream.
No longer content to figuratively take shots at those who disagree with them, many of these self-styled pundits have encouraged their followers to take violent action against the imagined boogeymen who seek to disarm them.
So the Capital Gazette tragedy doesn’t come as much of a shock, not only because it’s the 154th mass shooting of 2018, but also because alt-right provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos have been calling for just such just a massacre to take place.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Yiannopoulos is a professional troll turned internet pariah, who recently attempted to weasel his way back into the public consciousness.
Milo was banned from Twitter in 2016 after spewing hate speech at SNL star Leslie Jones.
Shortly thereafter, Yiannopoulos was forced to resign from his post at Breitbart News after seemingly advocating for pedophiliac relationships between grown men and young boys.
When even the hate mongers at Breitbart wash their hands of a fellow bigot, you know that person has stooped to a previously unimagined low.
Now, Yiannopoulos is in hot water yet again, this time as a result of comments in which he seemed to encourage the public to take up arms against journalists in the mainstream media.
In response to outrage over his remark that he “can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists,” Yiannopoulos has issued a statement in which he seeks to deflect blame:
“You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a Facebook post.
“The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you.”
Yiannopoulos goes on to claim that despite the fact that his comments were part of a statement to journalists and he himself posted the exchange on social media, the entire conversation was meant to remain private:
“I sent a troll about ‘vigilante death squads’ as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, ‘F—k off.’ They then published it,” he stated.
“Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a ‘threat,’ I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them – and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.”
The controversy made “Milo”: a trending topic on Twitter last night.
Which, unfortunately, is probably the exact outcome Yiannopoulos hoped for when he incited others to violence with his trademark brand of blindly hateful rhetoric.