Responding on social media to last weekend’s two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, former President Barack Obama blamed guns, white supremacist websites, and President Trump’s rhetoric.
“Until all of us stand up and insist on holding public officials accountable for changing our gun laws, these tragedies will keep happening,” Obama tweeted. “[T]here are indications that the El Paso shooting follows a dangerous trend: troubled individuals who embrace racist ideologies and see themselves obligated to act violently to preserve white supremacy.”
He went on to compare the radicalization of these purported white supremacists by a “proliferation” of white nationalist websites to that of ISIS.
Obama then echoed the anti-Trump hysteria of the news media, the entertainment industry, and Democrat presidential candidates by calling on Americans to “soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments.”
He also criticized rhetoric that demonized “those who don’t look like us” (i.e. nonwhites; Trump has never used this phrase, nor even implied it) or suggests that immigrants are “sub-human” (Trump called the savages of MS-13 “animals,” and the Left uses it to perpetuate the lie that he meant all immigrants). Obama even went so far as to compare such rhetoric to the kind that incited the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
Trump did not divide this country. The radical Left had been dividing us even before Obama was elected — a division he didn’t heal, but exacerbated. Trump’s election only exposed just how deep the division is.