Republican strategist Alice Stewart on Sunday slammed people who connect Donald Trump's failure to condemn white supremacy to the atmosphere of hate that allowed a gunman to massacre dozens of people at a mosque in New Zealand.
March 17, 2019

Republican strategist Alice Stewart was upset at the suggestion that Donald Trump's failure to condemn white supremacy has enabled the atmosphere of hate that allowed a gunman to massacre dozens of people at a mosque in New Zealand as well as numerous other attacks here in the US and around the world.

"I think it's irresponsible," Stewart said on ABC's This Week. "There's two people to blame for this tragedy in New Zealand: it is the gunman and the Devil. There's no two ways about it," ignoring that the shooter in NZ specifically cited Donald Trump as an example of white supremacy.

"We need to lower the tone and the rhetoric of the dialog that we have," she added. "But at the end of the day, these types of incidents are the result or the fault of the person behind the gun." It is unknown if Stewart is aware that Donald Trump closed the office studying the upsurge in white nationalism in this country and the corresponding uptick in violence.

Stewart also connected a surge of white nationalism to "the rise in globalism."

"I think you can say as a person and as someone who supports my nation and this country, I can also be supportive of my nation but also want to protect my boundaries," she explained. "I think that needs to be considered." This is the same argument Donald Trump made when asked to comment on the New Zealand tragedy, to pivot to border security, although there's no evidence that the shooter was in New Zealand illegally. However, in the US, every study shows that Americans are far more at risk from conservative white armed men with histories of white nationalism and/or domestic abuse than an undocumented person. Unfortunately, no one on the ABC News panel, including anchor George Stephanopoulos, was interested in providing that factual context to the discussion.

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