As if the liberal agenda teaching kids to be anti-gun and anti-Founders wasn’t enough, now they’re explicitly connecting today’s mass gun murders to historical mistreatment of minorities.
In her November 29 article, “Mass Shootings Are Connected to America’s Legacy of Anti-Indigenous Violence,” Ruth Hopkins figuratively launched Teen Vogue’s own 1619 Project to teach our youth how horrible our country and its founding was and always will be. She bemoaned, “The fact that the United States has a long, bloody history of mass shootings. The truth of the matter is this country was founded on colonial violence — built on the backs of black slaves and the bodies of millions of slain Native peoples.”
Hopkins then quoted that known luminary thinker, anti-gun activist David Hogg telling MSNBC, “If we want to talk about mass shootings, we have to recognize the massive number of Indigenous mass shootings that were committed by the United States government.”
Somehow, Hogg and Hopkins don’t see a difference between past military battles and shootings involving U.S. soldiers and government officials and today’s ostracized lone wolf killers indiscriminately shooting as many people as possible. And yet, Hopkins draws a bright line between the two: “The history of America is one of brutal mass slaughter, dating from the genocide of this land’s original peoples to the shootings we see in shopping malls and schools today.”
A Dakota/Lakota Sioux herself, she described the Sand Creek Massacre and several other shameful incidents in U.S. government history to make her case. She talked about Lt. Col. George Custer committing atrocities, but then said, “His vile exploits eventually caught up with him at a place my ancestors call Greasy Grass, along the Little Big Horn River, where he and his men were rubbed out by Lakota and their allies.” (see image above) Hopkins appropriately doesn’t consider this a mass murder, despite 268 of Custer’s men dying, but would if the roles were reversed.
But, that’s not all! Hopkins asserted, it's all about racist whites:
White supremacy has been a key component of American violence. Besides Indigenous people, blacks have also been massacred on U.S. soil…
America’s glorification and acceptance of gun violence often wears a white hood. This problem is systemic, and while new gun control regulations will help, we will not solve it unless we address these ugly roots.
This completely ignores the glorification of guns found in rap music and amongst gang members. And the fact that gun control advocates accept and ignore gun violence in inner cities and African American communities.
And then, it all goes back to Trump, of course!
Some believe that President Trump’s administration and his army of sycophants are responsible for this recent explosion of mass shootings. There’s no denying that many of the shooters are Trump supporters and his rallies are known for stoking hatred and vitriol.
But, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which Hopkins cites, there has not been an explosion in mass shootings under Trump. In Obama’s last three years in office there were 269, 335, and 382 GVA-defined mass shootings, respectively. Under Trump’s first three years there’s been 346, 337, and 381. Hopkins also conflated GVA “mass shootings” (four or more people injured or killed by gunfire) with “mass murders.” Referring to “the shootings we see in shopping malls and schools today,” she means "mass murders" (four or more people killed by gunfire, of which there have been 29 this year).
In her telling, “we have a long way to go in educating the American public about this country’s true history and its violent foundations.” No doubt this indoctrination of kids in Teen Vogue is just the beginning.
