Blog post serves gun control and police state agendas
A lout, and a bootlicker? Times blogger Levitt calls his fear mongering campaign a “public service.”
Newspapers and websites this week are decrying blogger Steven Levitt’s oafish invitation to readers to envision terrorist attack scenarios.
The New York Times is clearly using fear to sell papers and page views–an old marketing tactic. But Levitt might also be selling someone else’s agenda, just as his new employer has been doing for years.
Levitt begins the list of possible scenarios with this gem: terrorists, armed only with rifles, could shoot-up cities and towns of all sizes, and then escape in cars.
“The chaos would be unbelievable,” Levitt writes, adding “it sure would be a lot easier to obtain a handful of guns than a nuclear weapon.”
Some critics suggest Levitt is shaking things up at the Grey Lady–that his post caught his editors by surprise. (As someone who gets a regular paycheck from the Times, I can tell you that this is impossible.)
In fact, Levitt is fitting in just fine.
After all, it was the Times’ fear mongering over Iraqi nukes that helped sell Americans on the war–recall Judith Miller’s embarrassing “reporting” of what is now known to be fabricated evidence from worthless sources.
Levitt’s pairing of terrorists with rifles also repeats (literally) the Times’ editorial position that guns “are frighteningly easy to obtain” and that “stronger (gun) controls” are needed.
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