Did You Know That Its National Mental Health Awareness Month?

Wiser leaders and editorialists would focus on the growing crisis of mental illness, not pursue political advantage, when pontificating on several tragic shootings this past week

It’s a statement that Rahm Emanuel, former partisan Democratic congressman, Clinton White House Chief of Staff, and spectacularly failed ex-mayor of Chicago, claims is taken out of context. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," he said at a November 2008 Wall Street Journal forum.

"First of all, what I said was never let a good crisis go to waste when it's an opportunity to do things you had never considered or you didn't think were possible," FOX News reported when Emanuel was asked about the quote following a 2015 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona that critically injured former US Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ).

Tragically, Emanuel’s infamous quote now informs our cancerous political climate without pretense or reservation. Law professor and pundit Dr. Jonathan Turley outlines how the tragic mass killing at a Buffalo, New York Tops grocery store is being used now to advance censorship.

“Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY), adopted the same approach to the massacre in Buffalo in renewing calls for censorship on the Internet. While many drew the connection between the shooting and the need for greater gun control measures, Hochul notably went further to demand the curtailment of free speech protections. Speaking later at a church, she pledged to ‘silence the voices of hatred and racism and white supremacy all over the Internet.’”

Not a single word from Gov. Hochul about May being National Mental Health Awareness month or the killer’s deranged state being the major factor in his crime. It doesn’t fit the narrative, I suppose. Not enough partisan political benefit.

This week, President Biden opened remarks in Buffalo with wonderful tributes to each victim (I will not mention the killer’s name nor link to his deranged manifesto). Then he couldn’t help himself. Democratic political operatives have pounced and politicized the notion that we have an epidemic of “white supremacy” that leads to these killings. The FBI tells us so regularly. As he often does, Biden invoked the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia riot where racists protested.

Not a single word in Biden’s speech about May being National Mental Health Awareness Month. No green ribbon was sported on his lapel. It complicates the narrative, I suppose. New York has among the toughest gun laws in the nation, including a “red flag” law designed to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. How did that work out?

However, no trips are being planned by Biden to Dallas, Texas, where a deranged gunman with animus toward Asians took a .22 caliber rifle into a hair salon and shot three women of Korean descent. At least the Dallas Morning News and other local media are reporting it. It doesn’t fit the “white supremacy” narrative, thus lacking national or political attention.

Also, perhaps you missed the shooting by a Chinese Communist sympathizer at a church in Orange County, California.

On Sunday, a man opened fire during a church picnic in Laguna Woods, California, killing one person and wounding five others. The shooting was stopped after the congregation's pastor struck the gunman with a chair as he paused to reload. Other members of the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church then tackled and hog-tied the attacker.

According to The Los Angeles Times, the "Orange County Sheriff's Department detained the suspect, an Asian man in his 60s, and recovered two commercially available handguns from the scene." Sheriff Don Barnes said Monday that the shooter was an American citizen born in China who was motivated by hatred of Taiwan. (Emphasis added)

Oops. Doesn’t qualify for national media attention, despite the heroism of the church’s pastor. The narrative, you know. Move along.

But wait! There’s more, as reported by Yahoo!News:

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a series of related shootings on Sunday night wounded seven people. None of the injuries were life-threatening. Police spokesperson Kira Boyd said the shootings took place in "multiple locations" and appeared to be "related." From one scene, officers reportedly recovered more than 50 shell casings of various calibers.

Boyd also said the shooting was "not considered to be a random act of violence."

Texas

A pair of mass shootings took place in Texas, one in Houston and one in Amarillo.

ABC News reported that two people were killed and three injured at a Houston flea market on Sunday during a "fight between two groups of people." All five of the victims were reportedly involved in the altercation. The Houston sheriff's office said the shooting was "not a random act of violence."

In Amarillo, one person was killed and four injured in a shooting at a nightclub at around 4:00 a.m. Sunday.

Yahoo!News didn’t include this snippet from ABCNews in Houston: “One man who was uninjured was arrested for his alleged role in the shooting and charged with tampering with evidence, the sheriff's office said. He was identified by the sheriff's office as 27-year-old Angel Flores-Lopez.”

No word on the “white supremacy” rantings of Mr. Flores-Lopez. Nor the shootings in downtown Milwaukee after their NBA team lost a playoff game. Twenty-one people were injured. They must take their basketball very seriously in Milwaukee. A little too seriously.

But no, we’re all focused on the 18-year-old mentally deranged loner from New York. His “manifesto” (why do all these killers feel compelled to craft a “manifesto?”) proves, the media and Democratic politicians tell us, that he’s a “white supremacist” who subscribes to a wacko theory. Ben Shapiro describes it for The Signal at the Heritage Foundation:

“‘We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history,’ wrote the perverse murderer. ‘This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement. This is WHITE GENOCIDE.’

The shooter’s theory, generally called the ‘great replacement theory,’ suggests that a shadowy cabal of elites, mainly Jewish, have deliberately undermined the racial purity of European countries by facilitating mass immigration and race-mixing. The shooter deliberately quoted the neo-Nazi slogan—the so-called 14 Words—’We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’

While he attacked Fox News and rejected Christianity he didn’t mention any of their hosts, especially Tucker Carlson. While a white supremacist, he hated conservativism. How he describes his political orientation:

When I was 12 I was deep into communist ideology, talk to anyone from my old high school and ask about me and you will hear that. From age 15 to 18 however, I consistently moved farther to the right. On the political compass I fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category, and I would prefer to be called a populist.

Oh. That is a “mainstream Republican,” says the discredited magazine Rolling Stone. News to me.

That didn’t stop immoral cretins, including this former Bill Clinton press secretary and Democratic strategist, from a tweet like this. Perhaps Joe Lockhart should be more concerned about his appearance on Judgment Day.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer also wasted no time infecting the Senate floor with putrid rhetoric aimed at “MAGA Republicans” and Fox News for spewing “Great Replacement Theory” nonsense. The conservative-leaning Washington Examiner had to write a story to describe what it was since most conservatives are likely unfamiliar with it. The vast majority of conservatives know instinctively that any racial supremacy claims are not just anti-Christian but evil and, by definition, racist.

But the New York Times assures us that violence from “white supremacy” is a problem for conservatives. American Greatness’ Julie Kelly cites Biden Justice Department reports that suggest otherwise.

Attacking “MAGA Republicans” is very poll-tested, you know. James Hodgkinson, call your office. And those BLM-George Floyd riots? Nothing to see; move along.

Meanwhile, it is National Mental Health Awareness Month. Democrats would rather make that about “MAGA Republicans,” and Republicans aren’t saying much about it either. But based on the lunatic efforts to politicize tragedies, perhaps mental illness is an even bigger issue in our political sphere than we thought.

If we had real political leaders in America - and we don’t - they would use this crisis to focus on solutions to that serious issue instead of looking like part of the problem.

We deserve better.