CBS News anchor Scott Pelley, who is being replaced as anchor chair by the news channel, took, what is being called “parting shot” at Republicans. He said that Republicans played their part in bringing the baseball practice attack that injured five, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), upon themselves.
“It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress yesterday was foreseeable, predictable, and to some degree, self-inflicted,” Pelley began. “Too many leaders and political commentators who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric, which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence. Yesterday was not the first time.
“In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington area pizzeria to free child sex slaves that Hillary Clinton was holding there — or at least that’s what political blog sites had said,” he continued, referring to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. “He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.”
“Bernie Sanders has called the president the most dangerous in history,” Pelley said, “and the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.
“You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech and you’d be right,” the anchor added. “Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.
“In February, the president tweeted that the news media were ‘the enemy of the American people,” Pelley continued. “Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. And then he said, ‘No, it doesn’t worry me.’
“As children, we’re taught ‘words will never hurt me,’ but when you think about it, violence almost always begins with words,” he said.
“In the Twitter world we’ve come to believe that our first thought is our best thought,” he concluded. “It’s past time for all of us — presidents, politicians, reporters, citizens, all of us — to pause to think again.”
For his remarks on Scalise and the horrific incident, Pelley was severely criticized all over social media.
Those on the right have noticed the clear bias in the coverage of the attack on congressional republicans last week with prior attacks. The Gabrielle Giffords’ attack in 2011 was immediately used by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to highlight the Republican rhetoric; however he did nothing to take responsibility of his own rhetoric that may have motivated the shooter in the recent shooting. What’s even more interesting is that the attacker, James T. Hodgkinson, had served as a volunteer on Sanders’ presidential campaign. A deeper look into his social media accounts showed a series of posts clearly exhibiting his hatred for Republicans and Trump.