When crazed shooters can't be linked to the Tea Party ... they still are

So Now I Am Responsible for the Charleston Shooting Jack finds himself, American Thinker and Conservatives in general branded with a "scarlet letter" of blame for the Charleston Church Massacre! I had no intention of commenting on the recent shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church.  There were two good reasons why.  One was that I have always found it unseemly to exploit a genuine tragedy, especially before the bodies are buried and the event gains some historical perspective. The second was that the act was so anomalous.  In the highly racialized Obama era, there have been several black shooters who turned their wrath on multiple non-black victims – California’s Christopher Dorner, the Navy Yard’s Aaron Alexis, Omar Thornton in Hartford – but I could recall no instance in my lifetime in which a white shooter had done the same to black victims.  I was not sure what useful generalization I could pull from so rare a phenomenon. Alas, the Huffington Post, in the person of veteran propagandist Terry Krepel, forced my hand.  [...]   Excerpts: If the adultery charge against The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne was valid, the charges against sinners today rarely ever are.  “Even when you have no idea you’re committing a hate crime, chances are you still are,” Mark Steyn opined after Canadian neo-puritans dragged him before that nation’s official inquisitors. Neo-puritans exaggerate the sins of the targeted or concoct them out of whole cloth.  In either case, like Hawthorne’s Puritans, they publicly brand the sinner to render him or her, in Hawthorne’s words, “the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point.”   Indeed, if there is one shared ritual among the progressive subcults, it is the imputation of “hate” to the less enlightened.  And as those of us on the right know, there is no surer way of being branded hateful than by telling the truth. [FULL] Stu Tarlowe and Skoonj  circus A treasured  family friend—extremely affable and giving—and who we know to have exceptional raw intelligence, cited that "Anti-intellectualism is Killing America" story on my wife's FB page recently. America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance. This is what we're up against.  The left are so invested in their own convoluted beliefs and values that I see NO hope for any meaningful dialog, nor rapprochement.