Here are the facts, as correctly reported by the Hill:
A white pickup truck ran over two people, killing one, in Wilton Manors, Fla., just outside of Fort Lauderdale. The vehicle reportedly barely missed Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D), who was riding in a convertible at the parade.
The parade in question was a “pride” parade celebrating the LGBTQ community.
But leave it to the left-wing mayor of Fort Lauderdale, one Dean Trantalis, to instantly jump to a conclusion based not on facts but hate and stereotyping. The headline on that Hill story was this:
Mayor: Truck running into Pride parade was ‘terrorist attack’
The story reported this of the mayor:
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Mayor Dean Trantalis (D) said that an incident on Saturday in which a pickup truck ran into a crowd at a Pride parade, leaving one person dead, was a “terrorist attack against the LGBT community.” …
“This is a terrorist attack against the LGBT community,” Trantalis, who was in attendance at the parade, told local station WPLG. “This is exactly what it is. Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated, and it was targeted against a specific person. Luckily they missed that person, but unfortunately, they hit two other people.”
The mayor’s left-wing allies leapt to blame someone else — Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The governor had recently signed an “anti-riot” bill. Over at BizPAC Review, the bill was correctly described as “protecting the police and citizens against rioters and protesters.”
Then out came the true facts. The truck was driven not by a homophobic white guy but by a participant in the parade, a gay man himself. The problem was a malfunction with the truck, resulting in the driver losing control of the vehicle. A DUI test was performed and was negative. This was a sad, tragic, and perfectly explainable accident.
Here’s the headline as the mayor finally backtracked:
Mayor’s statement, after falsely calling Pride parade accident a ‘terrorist attack,’ makes things worse
This story reported,
The mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has issued a follow-up statement after he wrongly described a fatal accident at a “Pride” parade on Saturday as a “terrorist attack,” but it was lacking a key element: An apology for being wrong.
Instead, Mayor Dean Trantalis appeared to justify his earlier incorrect characterization of the incident by claiming that he, himself, felt “terrorized.”
OK. Full stop.
What the mayor was really about was pushing the left-wing agenda that has permeated both the Democratic Party and the “mainstream” media. That would be that white guys are homophobes and terrorists. His followers ate it all up. The hashtag #DeathSantis soared, with leftist tweets like this one:
#DeathSantis is as guilty as the person who drove the truck through the crowd.
Except, of course, the crash was an accident, the driver a gay participant, and the whole incident had nothing to do with DeSantis.
The moral of the story here is that the American Left is filled with crazies — crazies who hate and stereotype. And in this instance it was a literal matter of minutes before the mayor of an American city was using that hate and stereotyping to foment more hate and more stereotyping — and was not in the least apologetic for doing so.
Welcome to the American Left.
Buckle in.
