The narrative about a shooting in Vermont was another leftist, antisemitic lie

Finding truth in a world of lies is challenging. My default setting is that, if a news report is (1) anti-American, (2) anti-Israel, (3) anti-Trump, (4) generally anti-conservative, or (5) claims a race-based attack against people under the Democrat umbrella, it’s a lie. I go one step beyond Reagan’s “trust but verify.” I distrust and assume that the story will inevitably be destroyed with hard facts. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened with the narrative about the allegedly “Islamophobic” attack in Burlington, Vermont, when three Muslim men were shot by a local. (Not that the MSM has promoted the truth.) In fact, the shooter, while mentally ill, was anything but Jewish, pro-Israel, conservative, or Islamophobic.

Daniel Greenfield has written the truth about the Saturday in November when James J. Eaton, a local Burlington resident, fired shots at three Muslim men decoratively clad in keffiyehs as they left a party. For Democrats in politics and the media, the fact that Eaton was known to be unstable was irrelevant, as was the fact that he was also known to be progressive in his unstable politics.

What mattered to the left was the narrative. Biden instantly classified it as an anti-Muslim crime, declaring, “there is absolutely no place for violence or hate in America.” Kamala Harris echoed that sentiment, decrying people living in fear that they’ll be “attacked based on their beliefs or who they are.” The implication, of course, was that anti-Arab or anti-Muslim hatred was behind the shootings. Bernie Sanders was explicit that the men were shot because they were “Palestinian” and used the shooting to attack Israel.

Image: James J. Eaton by the Burlington Police Department.

And so it went down the line, with one leftist after another, whether in Vermont or on the national stage, blasting the Islamophobia behind the attack. Those who are openly pro-Hamas weren’t shy about placing the blame on the Jews. Writes Greenfield,

A speaker at the hate rally with the antisemitic University of Vermont affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine blamed the shootings on Jews, calling them the “shameless monsters who enabled this” and denouncing “a crime of unspeakable racist hatred, a crime borne out of white supremacy, out of fascist, genocidal malice, a crime borne out of Zionism.”

Every bit of this narrative was false. First, Eaton fired the gun without uttering a word. His motive at the time of the shooting is, therefore, unknown.

But it’s more than that. Eaton isn’t a Trump-supporting, pro-Israel, conservative, which is what Democrats wanted people to believe. Instead, Eaton is one of them—the leftists. Again, from Greenfield:

Eaton had been described as “that hippie guy” and “progressive”, an organic farmer who had posted a meme with a definition of “Amerika” that called it “the worst sense of the United States, ie imperialism, corruption and the global exportation of American culture.”

He appeared to be a Biden supporter

Media outlets, anti-Israel activists and politicians attributed the shootings to the Hamas war. Everyone from Biden and Kamala on down emphasized the “Palestinian” identities of those shot and implied that Eaton had attacked them because he was opposed to the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

In reality, Eaton supported Hamas.

On December 6, Seven Days, a local news outlet known for breaking stories about local politics, revealed that Eaton had tweeted, “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”

Responding to an article about a proposed ceasefire, he wrote, “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?”

As bad as the dishonesty of the initial narrative is the fact that, long after the shooting happened and the truth was known, mainstream media outlets were still supporting the “narrative” without any effort to correct the record. I cannot do justice here to Daniel Greenfield’s analysis, but I do urge you to read the whole thing.

The essence of modern leftism is post-modernism, and the essence of post-modernism is that there is no such thing as objective truth. The narrative is everything. Our institutions are utterly disinterested in the truth. They care only about advancing a worldview that drives power and money in their direction. Anyone who believes otherwise is dangerously naïve.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com