Topic: WorldNetDaily
Taylor Rose writes in an April 3 WorldNetDaily article:
The U.S. government running guns to Mexican cartels is “comparable to the United States funding al-Qaida to make someone in the United States look bad,” according to the author of a new best-seller.
Katie Pavlich is the author of “Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up,” news editor of Townhall.com and an expert on the Fast and Furious scandal.In an interview with WND, she asserted that the Obama administration intentionally orchestrated a “false flag” against lawful gun dealers, the U.S. Border Patrol and Mexican citizens to give cause for more gun regulation.
“This is a situation where the government was creating a situation where they could blame law-abiding citizens, turn them into criminals and creat[e] this false problem that they could solve through gun regulation,” Pavlich said.[...]
When asked by WND if the real agenda was to make American gun dealers look bad, Pavlich said, “absolutely.”
She said Obama, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder “were giving us this false 90 percent figure” that 90 percent of guns being illegally trafficked to Mexico were coming from Arizona and the Southwest border.
Pavlich asserts that the administration’s agenda is mirrored in a 1995 video of Holder that shows him advocating “brainwashing” children to think differently about guns.
Just one little problem: Pavlich's conspiracy theory has been utterly discredited. As Media Matters points out, Pavlich has cited no actual evidence to back up her claim, only circumstantial claims.
Further, no less than House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who's in charge of the House investigation of the operation, noted in his June 2011 report on Fast and Furious that the goal of the operation was to "build a large, complex conspiracy case" against members of gun trafficking networks supplying Mexican drug cartels.
The fact that there's no evidence to back it up, however, isn't going to stand in Rose's way:
Pavlich is not the only commentator to assert that Fast and Furious was an attempt to curb the Second Amendment. NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre said in 2011 that “Fast and Furious” was a “plot to undermine” the right to bear arms.
Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, in a 2011 interview with radio talk show host Alex Jones, said the government is criminally liable for Fast and Furious and described the operation as a “false flag.”
Rose apparently thinks LaPierre and Alex Jones are credible sources. Rose demonstrates no evidence of having bothered to examine the veracity of the conspiracy claim.
