PolitiFact hit Rush Limbaugh with a “false” ruling after the conservative radio talk-show host claimed that the person officials say was behind Sunday’s mass shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Fla., was “part of the Trump resistance.”
“I’m thinking you might not hear very much about this Jacksonville shooting after the preliminaries because it appears that the shooter was part of the Trump ‘Resistance,’ ” Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated radio program on Tuesday, two days after the shooting that resulted in two dead and 10 injured. The shooter took his own life after the shooting.
“The shooter apparently on a Reddit thread was very, very anti-Trump, and so the drive-bys are not going to want to make a vast, vast move on this guy, make it look like the resistance is taking up arms because people that hate Trump are supposed to hate guns,” Limbaugh continued. “You see, the only people that like guns are Republicans. And when it comes to the conservatives and the media, as far as the media’s concerned, conservatives who are no longer able to be conservatives are the best kind.”{mosads}
“Republicans who are no longer able to be Republicans are the best kind. And they get all kinds of fawning reverence and treatment,” he concluded.
Several far-right websites misidentified the shooter as a reddit user who identified himself as still alive on Tuesday, according to Mic.
As PolitiFact noted, some of the sites, such as Gateway Pundit, have since retracted the story after the reddit user noted in its story spoke out.
“Limbaugh’s comments were based on an article by the Gateway Pundit, which has since retracted its claim about the shooter’s anti-Trump political leanings,” PolitiFact posted in its fact-check.
“We searched through articles about the perpetrator and found no evidence the shooting was politically motivated,” it continued. “We rate this claim False.”
Limbaugh recently celebrated his 30th anniversary in radio earlier this month, and President Trump made a surprise call to the program to congratulate him on the milestone.