Attempted Assassination of Steve Scalise

[Ryan Ruck]

FBI: Gunman Who Shot Congressman Had No Target In Mind

June 23, 2017

Adrift and nearly out of money after three months of living out of his van in the Washington area, the gunman who shot a top House Republican and four other people on a Virginia baseball field didn't have any concrete plans to inflict violence on the Republicans he loathed, FBI officials said Wednesday.

James T. Hodgkinson, 66, was shot and killed by police after he opened fire on Congressional Republicans practicing for their annual charity baseball game against Democrats last week. Rep. Steve Scalise of Lousiana, the House majority whip, was struck in the hip and gravely wounded. Scalise remains hospitalized, and his condition was upgraded to fair on Wednesday. All five people who were shot, including two U.S. Capitol police officers, survived their injuries.

At a news conference on Wednesday, FBI officials gave an overview of the evidence they've gathered on Hodgkinson. They said he acted alone and had no connections to terror groups. But they said they had not yet clarified who, if anyone, he planned to target, or why, beyond his animus toward President Donald Trump and the Republicans he felt were ruining the country. It wasn't even clear whether he had prior plans to attack the baseball practice or whether he just happened upon it the morning of June 14, said Tim Slater, who leads the criminal division of the FBI's Washington field office.

"At this point in the investigation, it appears more spontaneous," Slater said.

Hodgkinson had a piece of paper with the names of six members of Congress written on it, Slater said, but the note lacked any further context and there was no evidence from his computer, phone or other belongings that indicated he planned to target those officials. Slater declined to name the officials whose names were on the note or say whether they were Republicans or Democrats or were at the baseball practice.

Scalise, 51, "continues to make good progress," according to a statement issued Wednesday by MedStar Washington Hospital Center, "and is beginning an extended period of healing and rehabilitation." House Speaker Paul Ryan said that Scalise "is on the road to recovery."

Hogkinson was an unemployed home inspector from Belleville, Illinois, who frequently railed against Republicans in letters to the editor and angry social media posts. In November, shortly after Trump was elected, he purchased the two guns that he used in the shooting, a rifle and a 9mm handgun. Neighbors called police as Hodgkinson conducted target practice on his property, but he did not violate any laws, the FBI said.

In March, Hodgkinson left Illinois and drove to Alexandria, Virginia, where he lived in his van in a YMCA parking lot. He rented out a storage unit where he kept more than 200 rounds of ammunition, among other belongings. He had two laptop computers, a cellphone and a digital camera. The FBI has not finished scouring those devices for evidence, Slater said.

In April, Hogkinson made the tourist rounds in Washington, visiting monuments, museums, the U.S. Capitol and the Dirksen Senate Office Building and taking pictures, the FBI said. He also took pictures of the baseball field where he would later fire more than 60 shots.

"The FBI does not believe that these photographs represented surveillance of intended targets," the FBI said in a statement.

Hodgkinson also visited the office of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign he had worked on as a volunteer, and was in email contact with the two Democratic senators from his home state.

The FBI statement and Slater's comments painted a picture of a down-on-his-luck man with few future prospects. Hodgkinson was taking prescription drugs, although Slater did not say what the drugs were for or whether he was abusing them.

"He was running out of money. He was not employed at the time of the event, and he was looking for some local employment. He was married for 30 years, and it appears that that marriage was not going so well," Slater said. "It was just a pattern of life where you could tell things were not going well."

I mean sure, Hodgkinson raged against Republicans in online forums, had a piece of paper bearing the names of six members of Congress (which the FBI is not releasing...), was reported for doing target practice outside his home recently before moving to Alexandria, had mapped out a trip to the DC area, took multiple photos of the baseball field he would later shoot up three days after the New York Times mentioned that Republicans practiced baseball at an Alexandria baseball field with little security, lived out of his van at the YMCA directly next door to the baseball field he shot up, asked, “Is this the Republican or Democrat baseball team?” before firing on the Republicans, ran a Google search for information on the “2017 Republican Convention” hours before the shooting, and took photos at high-profile Washington locations including the east front plaza of the U.S. Capitol and the Dirksen Senate Office but, they don't know what his motive was and he had no target in mind?

[vector7]

The Violence Inherent in the System

Backtracking the deadly dynamics of the Left.

June 27, 2017
Lloyd Billingsley



If a right-wing supporter of President Trump had targeted Democrats for assassination, as Dennis Prager contended, the establishment media would have made it the dominant issue in American life. In reality, James Hodgkinson was a leftist supporter of socialist Bernie Sanders, a gutless hatemonger who gunned down Republicans while they played baseball, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise. Only swift action by police prevented multiple murders.

As Daniel Greenfield noted, the left has been mounting a surge of hateful rhetoric, calling for Republicans to be “lined up and shot” and so forth. This was bound to translate into action, but the dynamic goes back to an event soon to mark a 100-year anniversary.

In October 1917, as war raged in Europe, the Bosheviks took over Russia, the largest country on earth. They did not, as some believe, “overthrow the Tsar,” but toppled a provisional government that was Russia’s first inkling of democracy. They preferred bullets over ballots and quickly established the Cheka to eliminate political opponents, including rival socialists.

Reportedly on direct orders from Lenin, Bolshevik troops shot, bayoneted and clubbed to death Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexi. The troops then burned the mutilated bodies.

Lenin died in 1924 and the reins of the revolutionary state soon passed to Iosif Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, a half-baked former seminary student and gangster better known as Josef Stalin. Once in power, Stalin eliminated rivals and made terror an instrument of policy. “There were no dissidents; they were shot before they came close to dissenting.” That was the view of Vladimir Pozner, once a high-profile Soviet apologist, in his 1990 Parting with Illusions.

In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a man-made famine in Ukraine that killed 25,000 peasants per day, a rate higher than World War I, when 6,000 soldiers perished per day. Those who broke the story of the famine, such as Malcolm Muggeridge of the Guardian, were called liars, while Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up the atrocity.

In Stalin’s USSR, justice was a three-step process: arrest, try, shoot. By the end of the 1930s, Stalin had claimed some 10 million victims. As Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht told Sidney Hook, author of Out of Step, “the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.”

This slaughter coincided with a wave of Soviet adulation Paul Hollander chronicled in Political Pilgrims. “One must not make a god of Stalin,” wrote high-profile American journalist Anna Louise Strong, “he was too important for that.” Such pro-Soviet progressives coupled their adoration of the USSR with a sulfuric hatred of the United States, in their view the flywheel of capitalist oppression.

Many progressives bailed after the Hitler-Stalin Pact and in 1949, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fisher, Richard Wright and others charted the failures of Communism in The God That Failed. Still others rejected Communism after the purges of the late 1940s and Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956. More than three decades later, in 1988, American socialist deadbeat Bernie Sanders, oblivious to seven decades of tyranny, opts to spend his honeymoon in the USSR. There he tells Soviet officials that the cost of housing and health care is “much higher” in the United States.

Three years later, when the USSR collapsed, depriving American leftists of their favorite model, and China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam also fell out of fashion. Undaunted, the progressives remained in the subjunctive mood. They duly transferred their allegiance to a future utopian state where an enlightened elite would achieve perfect social justice, ensuring that the masses get only what the state wants to give them.

While immanentizing the eschaton, progressive leftists preserve their hatred for the existing United States, even though it has preserved liberty, human rights, prosperity and opportunity far better than any of the socialist regimes the left has championed.

Like the early Marxist-Leninists, current progressives claim to know where history is going, so if the progressive candidate loses an election, it must have been stolen. In these conditions, those who support the winner need do nothing to earn progressive wrath. They get attacked as enemies of the people, enemies of the planet, on the wrong side of history, and so forth. That sort of dehumanization has been a prelude to violence and death on a massive scale, just as Stalin sought to eliminate the kulaks “as a class.”

In the style of Brecht, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve what they get.

That’s the deadly dynamic that goes back 100 years. That’s why comfy leftist professors call for Republicans to be lined up and shot. That’s why progressive assassin and Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson scratches out a hit list of Republicans and opens fire at a baseball game. That’s why the New York Times, which covered up Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, relegates the story to the back pages. It’s all part of the violence inherent in the system, and now playing out in America.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2670...yd-billingsley

[American Patriot]

Don't have time today to catch up on this thread... but I'll say one thing about the fucker who shot the congressman.

[Volk]

Don't have time today to catch up on this thread... but I'll say one thing about the fucker who shot the congressman.

I have the example of the Whites during the Russian Civil War. They didn't take the Bolshevik Revolution laying down, but fought the bastards every step of the way, like true Russian heroes, fighting like the Bogatyrs and Knaz of old. They were betrayed constantly, and died as exiles or laying dead on the ground of their beloved Mother.

We in America may come to that choice someday, facing a seemingly unstoppable totalitarian threat, but fighting with all we've got whether the cause is hopeless or not.

[Ryan Ruck]

Rep. Steve Scalise Re-Admitted To Intensive Care Unit

July 5, 2017

Doctors at the hospital where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., has been recovering from a gunshot wound downgraded his condition from "fair" to "serious" Wednesday after he contracted an infection.

In a statement, MedStar Washington Hospital Center said Scalise had been re-admitted to the intensive care unit. The hospital added that it would provide another update Thursday.

Scalise and four others were hurt when a gunman opened fire on a GOP baseball practice in Virginia on June 14. The gunman, identified as James T. Hodgkinson, was fatally shot by Capitol police.

The congressman was struck in the hip and the bullet tore into blood vessels, bones and internal organs. He has undergone several surgeries.

Sources told Fox News that doctors had anticipated that Scalise would suffer an infection related to the shooting. Sources close to the congressman indicated that they had been told from the start that the Louisianan's recovery would have ups and downs.

[American Patriot]

Damn, poor guy. Did anyone ever identify the weapon used? I read several things, but none of them seemed to be able to tell what it actually was. Even Fox News called it an "M-16" at one point

[Ryan Ruck]

Pretty sure it was an SKS modified to accept magazines. Seems I saw that a couple places.

[American Patriot]

I saw that too. Wasn't sure it was accurate though.

[Volk]

I saw that too. Wasn't sure it was accurate though.

All I know is is that had this been a lunatic out to do harm to a group of Liberal Congressmen, the MSM would not let us hear the end of it and there would be all manner of gun-grabbing hysteria.