Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

MTG, Pirro, Trump and so many others are extremely dangerously destructive people who repeatedly and maliciously spread totally false and dangerously divisive disinformation. Those, and too many others just now, extremist Republicans are all vicious and vindictive liars. At least they enough stupid things it's justified to say that about them.

See again one small town incident which they exploited and abused in the very worst way the worst of Republicans could. And did.

A Small Town’s Tragedy, Distorted by Trump’s Megaphone

When a teen’s killing became a right-wing talking point, the rush to outrage obscured a more complicated story.

[...]

They include former President Donald J. Trump, who denounced the killing of Mr. Ellingson, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate, at the hands of a “deranged Democrat maniac who was angry that Cayler was a Republican” in a Truth Social post. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia described Mr. Brandt on Twitter as a “Democrat political terrorist” and cited the case as evidence that “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.”

Mr. Trump and Ms. Greene were among a chorus of Republican politicians — including several members of Congress and the attorney general of North Dakota — who rushed to condemn Mr. Brandt. They relied on a handful of early news stories that cited a state highway patrol officer’s report, which suggested Mr. Brandt killed Mr. Ellingson because he believed he was a “Republican extremist.”

[...]

Acquaintances and a family member could not recall Mr. Brandt, a 42-year-old welder with no history of party registration, expressing political views.

Late last month, the murder charge against Mr. Brandt was downgraded to manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. He agreed on May 18 to plead guilty.

[...]

In conversations this month, residents of McHenry — a conservative, close-knit agricultural community where most families, including the Ellingsons and the Brandts, have known each other for decades, if not generations — said the narrative of the tragedy that Mr. Trump and others promoted never made much sense to them. But except for a handful of county officials, they have shied away from speaking on the record about it.

Robyn Sorum, the mayor of McHenry, said that she had advised the community against doing so to avoid worsening local tensions around the case. “Anywhere something like this happens, it’s a tragedy, you know?” she said. “But then you get to a small town where everyone knows each other, it makes it even rougher.”

Mr. Ellingson’s family did not comment. Mr. Brandt, through his attorney, Mark Friese, declined an interview.

Mr. Friese, who did not discuss details of the incident, described the aftermath as a cautionary tale. “I think we’re going to see more of this,” he said. “Things end up being tried on social media instead of in the courtroom.”

A confusing encounter

[...]

On the night of Sept. 17, a hundred or so people from McHenry and surrounding towns gathered outside of Buck’s n Doe’s for McHenry Days, a local festival. After midnight, when a three-piece country band from Fargo packed up and went home, some of the festival goers drifted into the bar.

The crowd included Mr. Ellingson, who had come to the festival with his family and stayed behind with his brother after their parents drove back to nearby Grace City. And it included Mr. Brandt, who came from a locally prominent family that had lived in McHenry since the early 20th century. His father and uncle had shot the immense trophy elks that looked down upon patrons from the walls of the bar.

Buck’s n Doe’s closed at 2 a.m. Fifty-five minutes later, the county 911 dispatcher received a call from Mr. Brandt. “I hit a man with my vehicle,” he said in the recording of the call.

At the time, Mr. Ellingson was alive and conscious but badly injured. He died later that morning at a hospital.

[...]

The next day, two Fargo television stations reported that a sworn declaration from a highway patrol officer said that Mr. Brandt had claimed Mr. Ellingson “was part of a Republican extremist group” and admitted to hitting the teen with his car “because he had a political argument” with him. The highway patrolman’s statement was based on a recording of the 911 call and an interview of Mr. Brandt by two other law enforcement officers.

But the declaration appears to have mischaracterized the 911 call. And the prosecutor never presented evidence that showed Mr. Brandt told officers that he ran into the teen because of the argument or that he believed he was part of an extremist group. Five days after the incident, a captain in the North Dakota State Highway Patrol told reporters that his agency had concluded the killing was “not political in nature at all.”

Subsequent court filings and testimony instead revealed a murkier, more confused encounter.

In phone calls, Mr. Brandt and Mr. Ellingson both made a reference to some sort of political dispute. Both called family members during the encounter, and each described feeling threatened, according to court records.

Mr. Ellingson told his mother “some politics had got brought up” and Mr. Brandt “didn’t like what he had to say,” according to a state Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent who interviewed Mr. Ellingson’s mother. She recalled her son saying “something to the effect of, ‘They’re on to me. I should round up my cousins or my posse,’” the agent testified.

In his 911 call after he hit Mr. Ellingson, Mr. Brandt said the teenager had said “something about some Republican extremist group,” but he did not claim Mr. Ellingson was a member. Mr. Brandt told the dispatcher he believed the teen was “calling other guys to come get me.” There’s no evidence Mr. Ellingson did so.

In the 911 call, Mr. Brandt described trying to leave in a panic only to be blocked by Mr. Ellingson. At one point he said he knew his running over Mr. Ellingson had been “more than” an accident. But he otherwise insisted the act had been unintentional. “I never meant to hurt him,” he told the dispatcher.

Both men were intoxicated. Mr. Brandt’s family and Mr. Friese say Mr. Brandt has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which Mr. Friese argued was a relevant factor in the case. An autopsy by the state forensic medical examiner ruled the cause of death as “accidental.”

[...]

The next morning, Gateway Pundit, a right-wing site that regularly seeds stories in the conservative media, wrote its own version under the headline “Crazed North Dakota man runs over and kills teen for ‘extremist’ Republican views.”

That evening, the case hit Fox News’s prime-time lineup, where it stayed for days. “This is a guy who intended to kill an 18-year-old Republican because he was a Republican,” Jeanine Pirro said during an on-air debate about the incident, claiming that Mr. Brandt chased Mr. Ellingson in his vehicle.

Ms. Pirro blamed Mr. Biden, who she said “is the one who started this extremist hate” when he made a speech about the perils of far-right extremism earlier that month. On Twitter, Ms. Greene posted a clip of Mr. Biden referencing “extreme MAGA Republicans,” adding that Mr. Ellingson was “executed in cold blood by a Democrat political terrorist because of rhetoric like this.”

[...]

In McHenry and the neighboring town of Glenfield, where Mr. Brandt lives, acquaintances said they were surprised by the claims of a political motive. There is no evidence in public records or court filings suggesting Mr. Brandt is a Democrat.

“I can honestly tell you, I don’t know who Shannon voted for in the last presidential election,” Ashley Brandt-Duda, Mr. Brandt’s sister, said in an interview. Although their parents are both registered Republicans, “I would say my family is quite apolitical,” she said.

Mr. Brandt’s reference to extremists was similarly met with surprise in McHenry, where both residents and law enforcement officials profess to know little about such groups. The county sheriff’s records do mention one previously unreported incident: In October, a long-shuttered local school was found to have been vandalized, its interior walls spray-painted with the stenciled logo of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group.

The building’s owner, David Ludwig, initially told a sheriff’s deputy that the break-in happened the weekend of Mr. Ellingson’s killing. But when reached by The Times, he said that timing was just a guess. Justin Johnson, the Foster County sheriff, said he considered the incident to be “totally unrelated.”

Nothing on public record suggests that Mr. Ellingson or Mr. Brandt had links to extremist groups.

‘Everything just exploded’

In the week and a half after Mr. Ellingson’s death, the case was discussed on at least seven Fox News shows. The coverage continued well after law enforcement officials had said the killing was not politically motivated, a point that was only occasionally mentioned on-air.

[...]

They received numerous threatening letters, too, Ms. Brandt-Duda said. One was written on the margins of an article about the incident from The New York Post, she said. The newspaper covered the case extensively and also published an opinion column arguing that the “president of the United States, supported by a fan-girl media, spouts irresponsible rhetoric that led to Ellingson’s death.”

[...]

Asked for comment, a Fox spokeswoman, Jessica Ketner, noted the company’s online articles but did not comment on the network’s television coverage.

Gateway Pundit, too, stopped publishing stories on the case. Politicians who had been quick to speak out appeared to lose interest. Mr. Trump, Ms. Greene, Mr. Jordan and Mr. Wrigley, the North Dakota attorney general, did not respond to requests for comment.

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These extremist Trump supporters exploit even any small town tragedy for their own vicious political ideology. They distort and misrepresent events with zero consideration of either the truth of what they are saying or the suffering they are causing to innocent others.

MTG's describing -- "Mr. Brandt on Twitter as a “Democrat political terrorist” and citing the "case as evidence that “Democrats want
Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.”" is about as dangerously and destructively false a statement you could find.