Should Donald Trump Be Blamed for the Actions of the El Paso Shooter?

 Patrick Crusius

By Robert Wenzel

Of course not! Every individual should be held accountable for his own actions. And in a country of some 330 million people, you are going to find a few severe nutjobs.

That said, it is very possible that the rhetoric of President Trump did trigger the El Paso nutjob.

It is reported that the shooter, Patrick Crusius, is a native of Allen (near Dallas), Texas who took the 9-hour drive to El Paso to kill some Mexicans because they were "invading Texas."

Trump's rhetoric sure could have convinced Crusius in his confused mind that he was doing heroic work.

Trump has tweeted:

6/1/19--Mexico allowing "millions of people...to INVADE the US"
6/2--Mexico must "stop the invasion of our Country by Drug Dealers, Cartels, Human Traffickers..."
6/2--"what are [Dems] thinking as our Country is invaded..."
3/9/19--"I am stopping an invasion"
1/31--Sending troops to southern border "to stop the attempted invasion"
1/11--"an invasion!"
11/18--"the U.S. is ill-prepared for this invasion"
10/29--"This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!'

That said, on the flip side, the lefty social justice warriors are no different in their group targeting.

Crusius posted a four-page white nationalist manifesto "The Inconvenient Truth" on 8chan less than an hour before he started shooting.

It should be remembered that 8chan emerged as blowback to the social justice warrior crowd, specifically as part of gamergate.

Whereas Trump ignores the individual to take a nationalist tone, social justice warriors reject individuals and attempt to frame society in terms of race, sexual "identity" and the like with straight white males categorized as the ultimate oppressors.

It is not difficult to understand how a few loser straight white males living in the basements of their parents' homes with no meaningful jobs and no girlfriends will quickly see the SJWs as oppressors. They know that not only are they not oppressing anyone from their basements of any ethnic background or sexual "identity" but the SJW view that they are and should be punished in terms of fewer opportunities for them that are instead given to others because of their ethnic background or sexual "identity" might trigger some of these outlier dudes. They are getting squeezed, in one way or another, from both sides.

What is going on is that both Trump and SJWs are rejecting the idea of individual responsibility and framing things in terms of some group identity so that solutions are not directed inward in terms of improving oneself but rather directed outward at perceived enemy groups. The right nutjobs can be triggered by Trump or the SJW (or both), and for SJW informed lefty violence see: Micah Johnson and the Dayton shooter, Connor Betts.

So while the individual nutjobs are just that, individual, Trump and the SJWs are both feeding views that oppression is at the hands of some groups. It provides the ideal cover for nutjobs of all kinds be they whites, blacks or Muslims to take out their anger against innocents who are painted as other than innocent by either Trump or SJWs or the government.

It is time to reject the group framing done by Trump, the SJWs and government, and call for individual responsibility for success and a decent life.

The only groups we should fear are the groups doing the framing of society at large.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.