BEDFORD, TENNESEE — Calvin Ryan is a 42-year old self-described “conservative Republican.” Ryan runs a couple of right-wing Facebook pages that he says are “fact-based takedowns of libtard ideas.” On one of his pages, Ryan recently lamented that the Planned Parenthood shooter was a white, middle-aged man and not a Muslim.
“What kind of world are we living in where we can’t automatically assume every act of terrorism is carried out by a Muslim,” Calvin asked his followers on Saturday morning. The previous day, Robert Lewis Dear entered a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Cololrado and began opening fire with at least one semi-automatic long gun in his possession. At the time of publication, not all of the details of the shooting have been released, but after Dear was apprehended alive, it was immediately determined the suspect had not been an unarmed black teenager, as experts in police use of force say that would have ended up almost certainly with the suspect dead. Calvin said in his Facebook post that he was “devastated to learn” that Dear was the shooter because he “couldn’t believe that people like Rush Limbaugh would lie” to him about who the majority of the terrorists in America are.
Ryan said that “it’s just not fair” that he and his fellow conservative Christian Americans will “have to face the same kind of scrutiny, generalizations and discrimination” they have “insisted that Muslims live under since 9/11.” In his words, Ryan said that it’s “obvious that Muslims are more dangerous in general, even though more people have died in right-wing extremist attacks in this country since 9/11 than in Islamic terror attacks.” Ryan said though, that he’s most “disgusted with the liberal media” for comparing the Planned Parenthood shooting to that of the attacks in Paris, France a couple of weeks ago.
“Do the people in the lame-stream media understand how much irreparable damage they are doing to this country by insisting that we hold ourselves to the same standards we hold Muslims to,” Ryan asked rhetorically in his Facebook rant. “Do they not get,” Ryan pleaded, “that Christian violence is different from Islamic violence for the reasons of ‘Jesus,’ ‘nuh-uh,’ and ‘I don’t like to think about it,'” he asked.
Toward the end of his screed, Ryan was demanding that the media “stop trying to shift our focus away from the very real threat of orphans and widows from Syria” and toward “the alleged threat of unhinged, murderous assholes who the NRA and the right-wing in this country have made damn sure will get his hands on a firearm” because “they’re doing the whole country a disservice.” Ryan said in his post he was “tremendously upset” he is having to confront whether or not people who share his beliefs are capable of the kind of carnage he accused Islamic people of being capable of.
“Good, clean, ammo-hoarding, red-white-and-blue-flag humping, God-fearing, Chik-Fil-A swallowing patriots know that Christians are not terrorists,” Ryan said, “even when they are terrorizing people. Because they are terrorizing people who God would want them to terrorize. People ask what the difference between a Muslim killing people in a theater at a rock show because they’re all infidels in his eyes and a middle-aged Christian radical gunning down people because he thinks they’re all baby killers is. And the answer is obvious — one group looks like me, and the other group doesn’t.”
