Dark influencers

 (Departing once more from the normal Blobosphere  to talk about non-Sportsball stuff. Standard protocols apply.)

Couple of sick f**** (excuse the potty mouth) attacked a mosque in San Diego yesterday, killing three people in a burst of gunfire, and God forgive me. My first reaction was not horror or shock or even a weary sigh at the perfidy of these days, but the following: Yep. Knew this was comin'.

Knew this was comin', because the fringiest of the lunatic fringies have been stoking the fire on antisocial media, ranting about the "Muslim horde" (hat tip to Secretary of Defense Sir Pete the Lionhearted Hegseth for that 12th-century gem) that's INVADING AMERICA and trying to turn a CHRISTIAN NATION into another Islamic hellscape ruled by Sharia Law. Lord knows from what stinking sewer lint-brains like these crawl, but they're suddenly everywhere.

It's their contention -- and even that of some of our elected boneheads, like that idiot Tommy Tuberville -- that Muslims are evil incarnate and don't belong here, and never mind that freedom-of-religion thing. The First Amendment, they claim, doesn't apply to Islam, because Islam is anathema to American culture and wants only to subjugate it. 

Even though Muslims have been part of the American fabric since the founding. Even though the Muslims I know are a lot more interested in Mohammed Salah and Liverpool subjugating Aston Villa or Arsenal than subjugating America.

No matter. Bigotry has no time for reality, and it's out there every day -- sent out into the online biosphere by beyond-hard-right webheads we've come to know as "influencers."

Being an elderly American hopelessly afflicted with terminal fogey-ism, I can't tell you what an influencer is, exactly. I can't tell you how or why certain people become influencers. From what I can tell, all it takes is a cellphone, a fondness for using it to film your every personal interaction every second of the day, and the massive narcissism it takes to do that.

After which, in some cases, you start up a website where you can share the ravings of your diseased mind with the similarly afflicted. With no consequences whatsoever, because words, apparently, are only words.

Except, in this case, three people are dead. And the two suspects, both teenagers, are dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds. 

To repeat: Teenagers.

Who cruise the Great And Terrible Interwhatsis 24/7. And who, let's face, seem to be particularly drawn to "influencers."

Mind you, this is not to say all the anti-Muslim poison out there right now triggered these particular teenagers. But I'm not saying it didn't, either. Words do matter sometimes, after all. And it's not like America doesn't have a long and ugly history of hate-stoking; go back to the 1840s, for instance, and the influx of Irish from the Great Famine prompted that era's "influencers" to rail that these Catholic heathen were coming to America to turn us all into Papists.

Stroll on down the timeline, and you'll find similar hysteria leveled at every succeeding wave of immigrants. The Chinese were diseased and incorrigibly foreign; Eastern Europeans were anarchists to the man: Italians were all criminal gangsters; and so on, and so on.

Always has to be an Other in the land of the free, I guess. And now it's the Muslims' turn.

To America's shame.