Erick Erickson’s driving need to be part of the right is unfortunate because it keeps driving him away from accuracy, and its mother, truth. For instance, I might take this bit, concerning the recently rendered 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis decision, more seriously. The press and pundits have been buzzing that one of the parties in this suit, Elenis, is not a gay man, but a straight man who never tried to contract with 303 Creative for a gay marriage web site, an activity the owner of 303 Creative would refuse to do. Sounds dicey, but Erickson asserts
In fact, with regard to the online request, the case had already been filed in Court prior to the request being made. The State of Colorado helpfully stipulated that Ms. Smith and her company would immediately run afoul of Colorado law if she refused to build a website for a gay wedding. Courts normally require an existing controversy, but this case falls in a rare exception where the Court will hear a legal challenge knowing a plaintiff would immediately be in violation of the law if she acted as she intended.
And, indeed, Wikipedia notes
Smith, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), sued Colorado in 2016 in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, seeking to block enforcement of the anti-discrimination law in a pre-enforcement challenge.
How the straight guy’s name got involved in this is not yet clear to me. But Erickson appears to be part way to being right. Too bad he fouls up all of his credibility by this ridiculous statement:
Yes, Trump supporters may have stormed the Capitol on January 6th. But it is members of the left who attempted both the mass assassination of members of Congress and the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice. The press corps that lectures Trump supporters on their illegitimacy feed and fuel the antics of the deranged and angry left.
This mass assassination reference is to an actual occurrence, a shooting at the US Capitol in 1954:
The 1954 United States Capitol shooting was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists who sought to promote the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence from US rule. They fired 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols onto the legislative floor from the Ladies’ Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber within the United States Capitol.
It’s worth noting that he may also refer to the attack of a mentally ill man on a small group of Republican Congressional members assembled for a baseball practice, and I reprimand Erickson for his ambiguity. Seeing as Erickson takes a bit of pride in citing the Puerto Rican incident, I suspect his reference is to it, and will so continue in that vein.
Nobody died in 1954. Were those responsible clumsy assassins?
Upon being arrested, [Lolita] Lebrón yelled, “I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico!”
Are they considered heroes of the left? Not being a leftist myself, I cannot definitively say – but, despite wide reading, I’d never heard of this shocking incident until Erickson mentioned it a couple of years ago[1]. And they advocated for Puerto Rican independence, the definition of nationalists. What are one of the attributes of the Republican Party?
Ardent nationalists.
Perhaps citing incidents so isolated from current events chronologically is a fool’s decision, eh?
The attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice reference is easier. It refers to the 2022 incident in which a mentally ill man, Nicholas John Roske, arrived at Justice Kavanaugh’s residence with a gun, looked around, realized he was off his meds, called 911 and surrendered. Not a shot was fired, bomb thrown, poison dart flung. One might argue that the presence of Kavanaugh’s security detail was responsible for stopping an assassination attempt, but that is a weak argument inasmuch, in Erickson’s desperate attempt to drag his political opponents down to his level, he omits similar questions concerning assassination “attempts” on Democrats. That is, how would we even know about them?
In other words, this is nothing more than illegitimate speculation. The facts argue against calling this an assassination attempt; at best, it’s exceptionally weak-kneed.
And so Erickson discredits his perhaps-worthy commentary on 303 Creative v. Elenis, not to mention his frenzied defense of Thomas and Alito. This is why I find it impossible to credit right-wing arguments. They’re so easy to pick apart that it’s, charitably speaking, embarrassing.
1 For that matter, the attack on the Republican baseball team has not resulted in adulation for the attacker, James Hodgkinson. He’s considered mentally ill at best, a shameful embarrassment at worst. This cannot be said for the January 6th attackers.
