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This Washington Post article is absurd and laughable.

But it caught the eye of the Dayton mass-murderer, who took it seriously.

HT Heavy.

Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”….

Via Federalist.

The Washington Post has seen better days. The newspaper that once brought us Watergate published an article last week titled “You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln,” claiming that Lincoln and Marx were “friendly and influenced each other,” and that Lincoln had strong sympathies for socialism. The article distorts history, and relies on questionable evidence and flimsy anecdotes.

Gillian Brockell, who wrote the article, states that Lincoln was “surrounded by socialists and looked to them for counsel,” citing his close connections with the leadership of the New York Tribune as proof. Brockell mentions Lincoln’s close friendship with Horace Greely, founder of the Tribune, a man who “welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north.”

Lincoln was also close to Charles A. Dana, managing editor for the Tribune and a close friend of Marx. During the Civil War, Dana worked as Lincoln’s “eyes and ears in the War Department,” and the president would wait “eagerly” for his dispatches. Under Dana and Greely’s watch, the Tribune published almost 500 articles by Marx, and since Lincoln was an “avid reader” of the Tribune, Brockell assures us that “it’s nearly guaranteed that… Lincoln was reading Marx.”….

Brockell graciously concedes that Lincoln was “not a socialist, nor communist, nor Marxist”—which is kind of her to do after spending half the article making the case that the Great Emancipator was cozy with socialists, sympathetic to their cause, and best buds with Karl Marx and Co. It would be even more gracious if she mentioned Lincoln’s view that “it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” You can almost see Marx cringe….

Yet the biggest difference between Marx and Lincoln is not their economic views, but their views of democracy. Marx saw democratic institutions as the tools the bourgeoisie used to oppress the working class. He favored instituting a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and once warned that the only way to shorten the “murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society” was “revolutionary terror.”

Lincoln, meanwhile, had an unshakable faith in American democracy. He acknowledged the evil of slavery but knew the best way to destroy it was by working through the constitutional system instituted by the Founding Fathers, not by taking a sledgehammer to our founding ideals….