A rather curious ommission from “Sixty Minutes” correspondent Norah O’Donnell who interviewed Rep. Stephen Scalise who was shot practicing for the congressional baseball game last June.

The shooter, James Hodgkinson, was a Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders supporter. But you wouldn’t have gotten that information from O’Donnell who referred to the shooter as simply “anti-Republican.”

NORAH O’DONNELL: Did you see the shooter?

STEVE SCALISE: Never saw the shooter.

The shooter was 66 year-old James Hodgkinson. According to the FBI, he’d posted anti-Republican views on social media and had “a piece of paper that contained the names of six members of Congress.” We’ve learned they were all conservative Republicans. Scalise was not on the list but two of his teammates were.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Do you believe you were targeted as a Republican?

STEVE SCALISE: I think it was clear he had a political agenda if you want to even call it that. And it’s a sick twisted agenda. I don’t think he could have been in the right frame of mind. But it was clear what his intentions were.

It’s not like Hodgkinson tried to hide his affiilation or where his loyalties lay. He also didn’t try to hide his motive.

CNN:

James T. Hodgkinson, the man identified as shooting a Republican member of congress and four others on Wednesday morning, was a small business owner in Illinois who defined himself publicly by his firm support of Bernie Sanders’ progressive politics — and his hatred of conservatives and President Donald Trump.

This is based on CNN’s review of Hodgkinson’s Facebook profiles, public records, and three years of impassioned letters to his local newspaper.

“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” he posted on his personal Facebook page on March 22.

“Republicans are the Taliban of the USA,” he posted in February.

[…]

Hodgkinson’s online presence was largely defined by his politics. For example, his public Facebook posts date back to 2012 and are nearly all about his support for liberal politics. He was passionate about tax hikes on the rich and universal health care.

In the past year, most of his Facebook posts consisted of signed petitions on Change.org with titles such as: “Bernie — please run no matter what;” “Hillary Rodham Clinton should concede the nomination to Bernie Sanders;” and “Healthcare for all Americans.”

In one public post on May 24, he signed a petition to “Stop the NEXUS Pipeline” in Michigan and Ohio. After Hodgkinson’s Facebook profiles were discovered by news reporters, they were updated to prevent public access.

On Wednesday, Senator Sanders publicly acknowledged that Hodgkinson had volunteered for his presidential campaign last year, but he denounced the violence as “despicable.”

Hodgkinson’s own descriptions on social media portray him as an avid consumer of political shows. His favorite television shows were listed as “Real Time with Bill Maher;” “The Rachel Maddow Show;” “Democracy Now!” and other left-leaning programs.

His favorite movie? The documentary “Inequality for All,” featuring progressive economist Robert Reich.

He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including “Terminate The Republican Party;” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans;” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”

This was a political assassination attempt. Not even mentioning the shooter’s politics is journalistic malpractice. There are a lot of people who are “anti-Republican” — including some Republicans. That his Democratic party activism wasn’t mentioned was a deliberate effort to downplay the political motivation for the assassination attempt. Would there have been a similar attempt to gloss over the political motivation of a shooter if he was a Republican? 

It is also incomprehensible why the shooter’s strong support for Bernie Sanders never came up in the report. 

The inconvenient truth not mentioned by “Sixty Minutes” is that the hysterical, exaggerated, violent rhetoric directed against Trump and Republicans by Democrats and the far left were the primary motivating factor in Hodgkinson’s shooting spree. The bottom line is that Democrats enabled Hodgkinson and have yet to be called out for it.

Recent FBI statistics show that there is at least a “causal relationship” between reduced policing in cities that suffered from anti-police violence and violent crime.

The most glaring example is Chicago, where police have come under withering attack for several high profile killings of unarmed civilians. The murder rate went up an astronomical 86% from 2014 to 2016. But other cities, including Dallas, Baltimore, Milwaukee, St, Louis, and Charlotte also experienced spiking numbers of murders.

The common factors in all those cities were protests and riots against perceived police brutality.

Daily Caller:

As McDonald sees it, agitation by groups such as Black Lives Matter, encouraged by slanted media coverage, has led to a retrenchment among big-city police forces. Street cops are so worried about being vilified by city leaders and the press that they are avoiding contact with the criminal element, she says.

“Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened,” MacDonald wrote in a Sept. 25 piece for City Journal. “Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by.”

Critics have said MacDonald’s theory is not supported by statistical evidence, noting that big spikes in violence occurred in just a handful of cities. If the Ferguson Effect were a real phenomenon, they argue, it would have manifested itself across the country.

“It’s really a local problem, not a broad trend,” Ames Grawert, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Intercept in 2016. “There is no evidence that crime has gone up overall.”

Another year’s worth of FBI data, however, adds weight to MacDonald’s argument. Killings have spiked in several cities that experienced rioting or significant protest against the police.

Dallas, for example, recorded 171 murders in 2016 — 47 percent more than in 2014. The story was the same in Charlotte and Milwaukee, whose 2016 homicide totals were 43 and 57 percent higher than in 2014, respectively.

Nowhere is the correlation between reduced police activity — what MacDonald calls “de-policing” — and a higher number of murders stronger than it is Chicago.

Earlier this year, the University of Chicago issued a report on the data behind the city’s horrifying rise in gun violence in 2016. After concluding the wave of murders couldn’t be attributed to warm weather or a decrease in educational or social welfare spending, the report suggested a precipitous drop in police stops might be a causal factor.

It isn’t just officers being worried about getting into trouble for stopping people. There is real fear on the streets. Targeted assassinations of police officers are rising as black activists use white hot rhetoric to describe police as “terrorists” or that they’re “targeting” black males.

Every time an officer gets out of their patrol car in a high crime area, they have to be wondering if there is a shooter out there. This is the reality that police officers face and is certainly a part of the “Ferguson Effect.”

Politicians in big cities have shown they do not have officers’ backs. This contrbutes to the feeling that cops are alone and is a huge disincentive for them to enforce the law.

The Ferguson Effect is real. How many more cops have to die to convince anti-police activists of that fact?