The item at MoronMajority.com was funny enough: “Trump Pardons Charles Manson.”
The satire riffed off the president’s pardons of military personnel accused of wrongdoing, but one of the many Democrat candidates who have zero chance of winning, Marianne Williamson, believed it. And so she tweeted out the “news.”
No harm done.
But then came the tweet from a frontwoman for Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s effort to impose unconstitutional gun controls on law-abiding Americans, Everytown for Gun Safety.
Trump probably will pardon Manson once he sees Williamson’s tweet about the fake story, left-wing activist Shannon Watts saracastically wrote.
Watts’s snide cheap shot, which did not identify Williamson’s claim as false, was no surprise. Her gun-control group has repeatedly peddled false data on “gun violence.”
Original Story
Williamson likely saw the story at the leftist Daily Kos, one of the many websites gripped by Trump Derangement Syndrome, which in turn reprinted the full item from Moron Majority:
Just days after pardoning three service members convicted, or accused, of war crimes, Donald Trump has issued a posthumous pardon to the convicted cult leader, Charles Manson, who died in prison in 2017.
Asked why he would pardon one of the most hated criminals in American history, Trump replied, “I always thought Charlie got a bum rap. He never killed anyone. It was his followers who committed the crimes.”
The fake story said Trump pardoned Manson, who masterminded the murder of seven people in 1969, not only to distract Americans from the Democrat effort to impeach him, but also to soften up the public for the anticipated pardon of Roger Stone, the veteran political operative convicted of crimes in working for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Williamson believed it: “There is something deeply sinister about Trump pardoning Manson, even posthumously,” she tweeted. “Dog whistles of the very worst possible kind.”
Williamson deleted the Tweet, but Watts piled on, suggesting that Trump would indeed pardon Manson: “This is absolutely the first thing Donald Trump will do in the morning when he sees this (just deleted) tweet from Marianne Williamson.”
Some of Watts’s followers believed it.
Watts’s Data
No one knew who Watts was until she declared herself an expert on “gun violence” after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. She started a Facebook page, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which merged with Mayors Against Illegal Guns to form Everytown for Gun Safety with financial backing from Bloomberg, now a Democrat candidate for president.
One of his main objectives: seize guns from law-abiding Americans with “common sense” gun controls.
Part of that effort, the anti-gun Washington Post reported last year, is retailing false data about school shootings.
In a still-undeleted Tweet, Everytown claimed that the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was “the 18th school shooting in the U.S. in 2018.”
That claim was and is “wrong,” the Post reported, the nice way of calling it a lie.
“Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings,” the Post reported, including a suicide at a school that had been closed for seven months. “There were no teachers,” the Post reported about the suicide. “There were no students.”
As well, the group lists shootings that occur on school grounds at night after the school is closed. Even the accidental discharge of a firearm is inlcuded. “A group of college students were at a meeting of a criminal-justice club in Texas when a student accidentally fired a real gun, rather than a training weapon,” the Post reported of another Everytown claim. “The bullet went through a wall, then a window,” and “no one was hurt.”
A 2016 “school shooting” included “a man in an Indiana high school parking lot whose gun accidentally went off in his glove box, before any students had arrived on campus.”
All those are “school shootings,” Everytown claims, although it did remove the suicide from its list.
In 2015, the Post awarded the group four Pinocchios for the false claim that “since the shooting at Sandy Hook [in 2012], there has been one school shooting on average per week.” Once again, Everytown had included “school shootings” that were not school shootings.
Watts is also a board member emeritus of the hate-Trump Emerge America outfit. Its mission is “to increase the number of Democratic women in public office,” but in any event an observation and question about the Watts-Bloomberg campaign to grab guns is this: School shootings are bad enough. Why lie about the data?
Maybe for the same reason Watts felt compelled to tweet the petty smear about Trump that left Williamson’s claim uncorrected. Anything goes if it gets the job done.
Image: screenshot of Shannon Watts’ tweet
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
