Small, Irrelevant NY Tabloid: Conservative San Bernardino Victim Deserved to Die
According to a small, irrelevant New York tabloid, there were really only 13 victims of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. The 14th, you see, was an outspoken right-wing conservative on Facebook who got what was coming to him.
That’s only barely an exaggeration. In a Saturday column, Linda Stasi shrieks that “13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage.” The 14th victim of the shooting who isn’t innocent is presumably guilty. And when a guilty man is killed by another guilty man, who sheds a tear?
What was the murdered man’s crime? Nicholas Thalasinos “spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about [Islam]… Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy.”
Meanwhile, the article’s headline when posted to Facebook reads simply “San Bernardino bloodbath born of bigots.” Bigots, plural. Since the article focuses on Thalasinos and only one of the killers, the clear implication is that the victim of a terrorist attack was partly responsible his own death.
Now, Stasi doesn’t actually bother to post in full any of Thalasinos’ Facebook posts (because apparently digging through a dead man’s Facebook posts for evidence to condemn him is a-okay, but linking to them is beyond the pale). But the excerpts she does post doesn’t seem that far afield from your typical outspoken conservative; Thalasinos was an Ann Coulter fan, thought politicians were biased against the Jewish people and Israel, denounced Democrats for “sacrificing” and “selling” unborn children, and said Million Muslim March participants could shove it up their asses.
You may or maybe not agree or disagree with Thalasinos’ ideas or his rhetoric. But “just as bigoted” as literal members of ISIS, who murdered people for the crime of being non-Muslims? No. The typical person could scroll through their Facebook feed and find half a dozen equally bombastic friends.
At times, the effort to compare Thalasinos to his killer becomes laughable: “Thalasinos was a radical Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew, who also connected with his future wife online and had traveled across the country to meet her,” Stasi notes breathlessly. (Note to online daters: if you ever get murdered by a radical Islamic terrorist, be aware that your dating history will be used to declare you just as bad as your killer.)
The attack would be despicable coming from anyone, but coming from the small, irrelevant tabloid it’s simply baffling. The publication in question is often known for over-the-top left-wing rhetoric blared across its front page and employing columnists like Stassi and #BlackLivesMatter activist Shaun King. The purpose of these actions, as Mediaite’s Joe Concha points out, is to generate conversation and media mentions about a dying publication… media mentions you’ll notice are missing from this column.
In short, even if Thalasinos was an ultraconservative who used inflammatory rhetoric, he has a direct parallel in the small, irrelevant tabloid. But somehow I suspect its editors would be outraged if a conservative columnist like myself claimed that they were just as bad as the perpetrators of a terrorist attack, and would be doubly outraged if one of their editorial staff was killed in said attack. But what are small considerations like “consistency” and “basic human decency” when you need to generate clicks?
Oh by the way, were you wondering how Thalasinos’ Facebook history even became public? It’s because the attorney for the ISIS killers publicized his Facebook postings as part of a legal strategy to cast the killer as a disgruntled employee lashing out at at bigoted co-worker.
So the small, irrelevant tabloid was literally aiding the perpetrators of the San Bernardino attack by publishing the piece. But hey, it’s the NRA who are terrorists or something.
[Image via screengrab]
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
