Missouri AG puts GOP over truth to shield senators falsely ID’ing Chiefs rally shooter | Opinion

Should lawmakers have a free pass on bad behavior?

Surprise! We’re not talking about Donald Trump here, even though he long has claimed this very thing.

We’re referring to Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s argument that three GOP members of the Missouri Freedom Caucus are protected by “legislative immunity” when they posted false statements on the social media network X.

The three state senators are being represented by the state in a lawsuit claiming defamation.

Do we put our feet in our mouths sometimes on social media? Sure we do. But these lawmakers’ posts falsely and dangerously identified an innocent man as a gunman at the Feb. 14 rally celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory. One woman was killed in the mass shooting and 22 other fans were injured, half of them children.

State Sens. Rick Brattin, Denny Hoskins and Nick Schroer are rightly being sued for posting or sharing false statements on X that a bystander from Olathe was the perpetrator, and that he was an undocumented immigrant.

The senators used different language in the posts, from outright sharing and posting without verification (terrible) to questioning the veracity of the claims (a little better).

The nonprofit Missouri Independent quoted an X post from Schroer’s personal account, where he at least asked a salient question:

“Can we get any confirmation or denial of this from local officials or law enforcement? I’ve been sent videos or stills showing at least 6 different people arrested from yesterday but officially told only 3 still in custody. The people deserve answers.” But at the same time, he was recirculating the false accusation (which has since been deleted).

No matter though, all of them sharing the photo of the accused and calling him a shooter could have resulted in violence against this innocent man.

News stories are identifying him, but we choose not to drag his name through the mud again. However, we do choose to name the state senators, because not only should they know better than to make false accusations that are not verified, but because they claim that because they were acting as elected officials, they can’t be sued.

And that is the crux of the question.

The legislators do not refute that they made or shared the statements on X — just that they can’t be held legally accountable for their content.

Their “argument,” if you want to call it that, makes no sense. If anything, our leaders should be held to a higher standard than the general public, and most especially when it comes to matters of law and order. To claim otherwise makes a mockery of the very idea of public servants and the oath of office they swore to uphold.

The Missouri Constitution does say that state lawmakers “in all cases except treason, felony, offenses under this Article, or breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during the session of the general assembly, and for the fifteen days next before the commencement and after the termination of each session; and they shall not be questioned for any speech or debate in either house in any other place.”

That strikes us as overbroad and unwise in general (but good luck getting politicians to vote to remove any rule that shields them). But it’s also more than a stretch to claim that posting on social media is part of anyone’s official legislative business.

Social media propaganda cesspool

Those wise minds who don’t throw away their time in the soul-sucking wastelands of social media probably don’t have any idea just how bad things have gotten there — but it’s worse than you might imagine. These days, Facebook has become ground zero for artificial intelligence-generated images, and its parent company Meta even offers its own tool to generate them.

That’s frightening on multiple fronts, and Russian President (and former KGB intelligence agent) Vladimir Putin has to be delighted to see American companies blurring the line between reality and fantasy on their very own, without any outside interference. Making everyday people question the existence of truth has long been the goal of authoritarians, who seek to establish themselves as the ultimate arbiters.

But at least Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has finally seen the light and conceded that, yes, his vast platform making it so easy to speak falsehood is dangerous and, yes, it probably tipped the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. Over on X, though, new owner Elon Musk has led users backward into an increasingly destructive Wild West.

When the service was still called Twitter and under (somewhat) more responsible leadership, it suppressed known spreaders of hate speech and fake news. Today, Musk has drastically ratcheted down moderation of phony content and reinstated some of the most notorious propagandists on the platform, which now actively promotes hard-right content.

If you don’t spend time on X, you don’t appreciate how its echo chamber works. In the fog after the Chiefs rally shooting, the false ID of the Olathe man ricocheted around right-wing accounts, and these three Missouri lawmakers helped amplify it. The social network was designed to make this kind of rapid dissemination of information possible — and Musk has removed its most important guardrails to keep the network honest and non-threatening.

So in some ways, state Sens. Brattin, Hoskins and Schroer are social media victims themselves, just like every other user who grew up reading responsible media sources that don’t intentionally lie to their audience. Those days are over. However, the people of Missouri have every right to expect their elected officials to educate themselves as savvier media consumers and not spread tall tales they haven’t verified.

And our state’s attorney general should let the spirit of public service guide him to do the right thing and allow justice to be served if the lawmakers did indeed defame a private citizen. That’s what his office requires — and the voters he’ll face for the first time in November should demand the same.