California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has teamed up with Vice President Kamala Harris, Governor Tim Walz and MSNBC to misrepresent what Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) actually said in response to the horrific school shooting in Georgia.
“J.D. Vance: School shootings are just a 'fact of life,'” Newsom said on social media. “Kids are getting killed and he shrugs it off. Let's remember that in November.”
But Newsom is wrong. Vance didn't callously dismiss school shootings as a “fact of life” and urge Americans to just get over it. Vance actually called for increased school security to protect kids from these “psychos,” a legitimate claim given that armed school resource officers stopped the shooter before he could kill more people.
“If these psychopaths are going to target our children, we have to be prepared for that,” Vance said. “You don't have to like the reality we live in, but it's the reality we live in, and we have to deal with it.”
“I don't like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. This is a far cry from the mainstream media, which often cites Vance only in part, leaving out the full context of his statements.
“But if you're a psychopath and you want to be in the headlines, you realize that our schools are ideal targets for attack, and we have to increase security in our schools, because if a psychopath wants to come in through the front door and kill our kids, he can't do it,” Vance added.
Newsom is not alone in spreading misinformation: Harris and Walz have also joined in.
Following misinformation about what Harris actually said, Vance reminded Americans that she is “not trying to protect our kids, but to make our schools safer.”
“Instead of addressing her own failures, she lies about what I said,” Vance said, adding, “This is yet another piece of despair from the greatest fraud in American politics.”
This is true: During her 2019 campaign, Harris called for removing police officers from schools to address “inequities” in student discipline.
“Part of what we need to do to demilitarize schools and get police out of schools is to face up to the reality and tell the truth about the inequities around school discipline,” she said at the time, “that black and brown boys, in particular, are being expelled and suspended as early as elementary school.”
Despite the facts, both MSNBC and the Associated Press repeated this lie as well.
“The comments that he made right there are a very stark example of the difference between the two campaigns: Harris-Waltz versus Trump-Vance. They take Trump-Vance as a reality,” MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski argued.
“Kamala Harris said right after the shootings that this is a choice we made and we have to make a different choice. People don't want this to be a reality of life,” she said.
The Associated Press also mistakenly reported Vance's comments but later retracted them, adding that “this post replaces an earlier post which was removed to add context to a partial quote from Mr. Vance.”
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