The black man who shot and killed two white former coworkers during a live standup at a Virginia television station on Wednesday was immersed in victimhood brought on by a society that advocated quotas over talent, according to talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh.
“Vester Flanagan was hired repeatedly to meet these [equal opportunity] and affirmative action goals, and he was fired repeatedly. Most likely his incompetence got him fired. But it was also attitude related. When he was fired so many times for these reasons, he couldn’t deal with it, and he went postal. No, let’s not say that. He lost it. He went mental health on everybody while deep in this stigmatized victimhood,” Limbaugh said on Thursday.
Much more background information about Vester Lee Flanagan II, the black man who admitted shooting and killing the two former co-workers, is emerging now.
For example, the Washington Post reported Jeff Marks, the station manager for WDBJ Television which employed victims reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, described Flanagan as a man with “a short fuse.”
“It came out in his relationships,” Marks said. “He had trouble working with fellow employees.”
NBC reported Flanagan, who died shortly after suffering an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound while he was being chased by police, had 17 stamped letters, a case with three license plates, a shawl and an umbrella in the rental car in which he reportedly was trying to flee.
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Fox News talked about going “inside Vester Lee Flanagan’s life,” and said he had been told before he was fired to seek help for possible mental health issues.
He then lived for more than two years in the same city, “living in squalor amid publicity photos of himself, porn and sex toys,” the report said of the man who went professionally when he worked as a reporter by the name Bryce Williams.
Nearly a dozen publicity photos of Flanagan adorned his apartment, the report said.
“The self-obsessed killer was apparently planning to get away with his murder of Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27,” the report said. “Cops who searched Flanagan’s car found a Glock pistol with multiple magazines and ammunition, a white iPhone, letters, notes, a to-do-list and a briefcase …”
The report said officers found “gay” porn and sex toys in their search of his apartment.
ABC, to whom Flanagan faxed a manifesto shortly after the shootings, said a man “claiming to be Bryce Williams” had been calling the network asking for fax information.
Then on Wednesday, he called again, to identify himself as Williams “but also said his legal name was Vester Lee Flanagan, and that he shot two people.”
He explained that he felt he had been abused by coworkers because he was “gay” and black and, “what sent me over the top was the church shooting [in South Carolina, where several blacks were killed by a white shooter].”
“And my hollow point bullets have the victim’s initials on them,” he said.
CBS reported Flanagan had to be escorted out of the building by police when he was dismissed by the station two years ago.
Among the details is the fact Flanagan had been dismissed several times, had several times brought allegations of discrimination, and had seen those complaints dismissed.
Limbaugh cited the courage of several American men who disarmed a potential terrorist on board a French train recently, and said that was “what used to be universal, worldwide manliness.”
The opposite is “people [who] have been indoctrinated by political correctness. Men who are shamed into not being men, men who have been henpecked or whatever into denying their maleness and masculinity on the basis that it is predatory,” he said.
“And this is the chickification of the country. And in some parts of the world, that has taken place with the rise of feminism. And that’s just a brief aside to illustrate that which I’m speaking about here. ”
In news organizations, he said, the federal government has demanded hiring on the basis of quota.
“And what happened in the early stages of this, and what I think it continues to this day, by evidence of what we saw … in Virginia, is one of the end-of-the-road results of this kind of government overreach. It’s mandatory minority hiring. Merit was thrown out in many cases. I saw… My point is, here I saw many qualified men who had been in broadcasting for years and climbing the career ladder in broadcasting (the way you did) lose their jobs, just get fired for no reason other the federal government was mandating that certain number of or percentage of on-air jobs be held by women and African-Americans and what have you,” he charged.
“So you end up having qualified people summarily fired simply to make room for what were required by government to be minority hires. They had to. It was an early way of looking at diversity demands, if you will. This is not to wring hands over qualified people being fired. I’m not doing it. I’m just telling you that the history. This goes back to the 1970s, the early 1970s. Perhaps prior to that, but I think that’s when it was. I came close to being one of those let go,” he said.
“I don’t blame the people that were not qualified. That’s not a rant on them. It is simply what ended up happening is that a lot of people who had no business being in this business got hired. And once they were hired, you couldn’t fire them for any reason. In many cases, you had either hold onto ’em or you had to promote ’em. … You had to keep your percentages in order to satisfy the government license renewal time and any other time as well. So this kind of compliance has been going on since the 1970s. And it has led to a lot of people who are not qualified in this business – and once they’re there, you cannot get rid of them. Well, you can, but you have to replace them with similar characteristic replacements. And we’re not talking about merit here.”
He said Flanagan “had been fired from numerous other TV stations that he would have never been hired at to begin with had he not been a minority.”
He said those preferences “stigmatized” the recipients of those positions.
“And this is what happens when employment performance standards are lowered or disregarded for the sake of giving people something that everybody knows they’re not competent to do. I listened to people who have hired this guy and worked with him at various stations talk about him, and it was clear that he had no affection – they had no affection for him, and vice-versa – and it was never a pleasant experience for anybody, and he had to be let go at practically every job.”
Limbaugh said ultimately it creates problems on both sides.
“It’s cruel to be forced to hire people who can’t do the job. It is cruel to be pushed into a job that you can’t do surrounded by people who can do it. And then if you come to the job already thinking you’re a victim and already thinking you’re stigmatized and as unqualified, I’m telling you, it isn’t a healthy circumstance. That’s why I think the crutch of being a victim is what they all fall back on. It’s a way of blaming everybody else. It’s a way of blaming coworkers. It’s a way of blaming the boss. It’s a way of blaming the management. And what we have here, folks, are victims of liberalism once again,” he said.
Flanagan, Limbaugh said, “was all ticked off that he didn’t get the job that supposed to get. He had PTSD ’cause he couldn’t get the job he wanted! So he’s relying on victimhood; the world was against him. He was one of these people always looking for trouble, he always was… He would walk around the office waiting for somebody to say anything that he could interpret as racist, to give him an excuse for failure, to give him an excuse for not making it.”
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