Several people, including one high-ranking member of Congress, were shot this morning at a baseball park in Alexandria, VA. The alleged gunman, identified as James Thomas Hodgkinson, exchanged fire with Capitol Police and Alexandria Police; Hodgkinson later died of his injuries. That’s the story all over the news today. But who was James Hodgkinson? The media certainly won’t tell you the whole truth – but Liberty Nation will.
Hodgkinson, aged sixty-six, was a staunch socialist progressive who campaigned for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential election. His Facebook page and various comments contain a litany of anti-Trump, pro-socialism rhetoric going back to 2015, with a very specific theme.
Photos on social media show a slightly overweight man in glasses who was very politically active both on and off the internet. In one photo, he was holding a sign calling for taxation of “the rich,” and mentioning Reagan’s “trickle-down economics,” a common progressive theme. In another post on Facebook, Hodgkinson expressed a hope that “Ebola trickles down” in the same way.
His posts to the pages of others, however, offer even more of an insight into Hodgkinson’s mindset and possible premeditation of the events occurring this morning.
In a post to a friend’s timeline dated January 20, 2017, Hodgkinson quoted Frank Sinatra’s classic song “My Way” as the caption to an anti-Trump meme.
“And now the end is near,” he wrote, “and I face the final curtain…”
Hodgkinson owned a home inspection business in Belleville, but records show that his license lapsed in late 2016. He did not renew it, but there is no information to determine context about that, and therefore no way to tell if his lack of renewal was part of his overall planning. There is also no word at this time how or when Hodgkinson traveled to Virginia, or how he chose the baseball practice as his target.
As loudly as Hodgkinson proclaimed his allegiance to progressive socialism, the media is equally as careful to never mention it. Several prominent news channels mentioned Hodgkinson’s “political motivations” repeatedly, yet refused to explain what his politics were, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks while anchors pontificated vaguely about the sheer madness of political violence – and of course, the need to get rid of all evil guns.
Meanwhile, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL) called the shooting the “result of political rhetorical terrorism” in a live interview with Fox News; Davis failed, however, to elaborate on how one would actually define “rhetorical terrorism.”
Law enforcement officials continue to claim that it’s too early in the investigation to know anything regarding Hodgkinson’s motivation, and FBI Special Agent in Charge Tim Slater stated in an early presser that it was “not an assassination attempt” – a remark he walked back a few minutes later, claiming that he “misspoke.” Meanwhile, everyone in America is combing through Hodgkinson’s social media accounts, and seeing what can only be described as an “inconvenient truth.”
Hodgkinson was not a redneck white supremacist.
He was not anti-Muslim, anti-gay, or anti-anything save anti- Republican and conservative.
He was not pro-Trump, pro-Cruz, or pro-anyone else on the GOP side.
He was, however, a card-carrying Socialist, a supporter of government-run health care, an avid watcher of Rachel Maddow and reader of DailyKos, and a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist who hated Trump enough to post things such as the following on Facebook:
Stay tuned, as the narrative creation goes into full overdrive. Here at Liberty Nation, however, we will continue to report the facts and the evidence as well as Hodgkinson’s motivations, which are, after all, germane to the story.
