With the exception of those who explain themselves, like John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz, political assassins tend to take their motives to the grave. Though the real reasons for their acts tend to be personal to the point of quirky — like John Hinckley hoping to impress Jodie Foster — Americans often point the finger at inflammatory rhetoric. Dehumanizing speech, we assume, is bound to prompt some weak-minded weirdo to act out.
Anti-JFK “wanted for treason” posters distributed in Dallas shortly before the Nov. 1963 assassination were cited as evidence that right-wing extremism had created a toxic atmosphere, implying that the city itself had sort of killed the president. But Dallas didn’t shoot Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald did. Though his motives were nebulous, his politics leaned left.
After former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by her constituent in 2011, liberal media outlets took note of a map tweeted by a PAC associated with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin released nine months earlier, which displayed targets over districts, including Giffords’, being challenged by GOP candidates. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, the media asked “whether there is a connection between” such “extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery” as that published by Palin and “actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be.”
There was no connection. The shooter had never seen Palin’s map. Yet when Palin sued The New York Times over an editorial that drew a direct line between her map and the murder attempt, she lost — and was ordered to pay the Times’ legal fees.
Correlation does not equal causation. What common sense dictates must be true — what feels true — that violent talk begets real-world violence, trumps what actually is true: mentally disturbed people do crazy things sometimes.
Still, the toxic-talk-is-dangerous meme persists. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) tweeted after the shooting of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
“Directly”? There isn’t even evidence of an indirect link.
The alleged shooter, 20, was a registered Republican who donated $15 to a liberal PAC in 2021. Confusing! He’s dead, no one has found a manifesto, and at this point Vance is just resorting to the usual speculation.
It seems unlikely that any sturdy peer-reviewed study of political assassins and would-be assassins will emerge any time soon that would settle the question of the relationship, if any, between a culture of violence — dehumanization, intimidation, threats of physical harm and actual killings and assaults — and attempts on the lives of politicians. Even so, an incident like the shooting in Pennsylvania should make Americans ask themselves whether lowering the temperature might not be its own reward.
As a leftist who does not support Trump, I was shocked not only at the stream of vitriol that swamped social media after the Pennsylvania shooting, much of it bemoaning the fact that Trump survived, but at the willingness of so many people to express such extreme opinions in public, under their own names, in an instantly searchable medium. Either they are unafraid of social repercussions or, more likely, it never crossed their minds that there might be any.
It is not hard to imagine why. These opinions are now mainstream.
Vance is right about one thing. Throughout the current campaign and going back at least to the start of Trump’s first run for the White House in 2016, Democrats and their media allies have characterized Trump and his MAGA movement as an existential threat to democracy.
Some went further.
Five days before Trump was shot, first lady Jill Biden told a gathering of Georgia Democrats, “Does Donald Trump know anything about military families? No. … He disparages those who sacrifice for our country. His own chief of staff said he called POWs and those who died in war ‘losers and suckers.’ He’s evil.”
There is no need to regurgitate a litany of overheated hate speech, especially in recent years. We all hear it. Demonization of political opponents, along with the determination that opposing partisans are not merely misguided or ignorant but willfully malign, is as old as politics. It is worth noting, however, that our government has normalized political assassinations overseas in a way that makes it difficult to (pretend to) be shocked when they occur here. Former President Barack Obama had Osama bin Laden whacked rather than brought to justice, Trump rubbed out a top Iranian general as casually as smooshing a bug (we’re not even at war with Iran), and even the press parrots official statements that sanitize such state-sanctioned murders with anodyne words like “eliminated,” “got rid of” and “took out.”
We may never know whether there is a link, direct or otherwise, between a culture that treats killing cavalierly and citizens who resort to violence against our leaders. Assuming that there’s no connection, however, what would be the harm in speaking more gently and civilly to one another? Depersonalizing our politics might open the space to address actual issues, some of which — like the high expense of and difficulty accessing psychiatric care — really are driving us nuts.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
There are right-wing academics who write of “More Guns, Less Violence” or at least NO increase. Y’know, maybe (I’d love if true). But, deep-down, I doubt it.
Same thing applies to ‘extreme’ Free Speech (“actual speech”, that is, what’s written or spoken): allowing it drives some people to suicide and to become (failed) assassins – at least, that’d be MY guess (if I’m wrong, wonderful!), even if that just affects those with “screws loose”…
The real reason we need guns isn’t so much to deter criminals, but to warding the Gov’t off from turning against “We, The People”.
At the end of the day, it’s really about one little thing:
Do we want a brave, daring masculine society or a touchy-feely, harm-avoiding feminine one‽
‘You don’t have to stand tall, but you do have to stand up’
No such thing as hate speech. That’s purely subjective drivel. And even if it was supposedly “firey”… WHO in the hell defines what that is?
Hate crimes and hate speech laws were introduced by Marxist to punish anyone objecting to their leftist agenda of promoting Blacks over Whites, women over men, and queers over heterosexuals.
Ted Rall:
Oswald lol … Ted Rall is obviously not reading JFK assassination material right here on Unz Revew, some by Ron Unz himself
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-what-happened/
Video Link
And re the Gabby Giffords shooting in 2011, that is another dodgy story. Media hides that the person killed that day was US Federal Judge John Roll, who had recently ruled against Obama, the killing perhaps a warning to other judges … witnesses described more than one shooter … the fake-seeming lone killer Jared Lee Loughner seems a caricature
his politics leaned left.
That’s one way to describe a communist I suppose.
“Lee Harvey Oswald did” ROTFLMAO…. my God, what an ignoramus.
Addendum:
If you care about Freedom/Liberty, risk it: choose the masculine ethos. That’s the only way to advance in a meaningful way Medicine, Science, Philosophy, Technology… it is worth it, at the end of the day BY FAR!
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East Asians (“Orientals”) are more risk-averse, due to their collectivism (there are pros and cons). So, in a way, for Whites at least FREEDOM is a Way of Life!
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/wild-west-mentality-lingers-in-us-mountain-regions
What Rall is failing to grasp is that there is no clear line that can be drawn between speech and violence. A moral claim that one course of action is right, and another course is wrong, is a claim that its supporters have the right to put their intentions into reality. This is the very meaning of political speech.
The problem is not that speech is becoming unhinged. The problem is that the USA is no longer a nation. There is no “we” there which has a collective interest. It is an unwieldy alliance of hypereducated elites, midwit bureaucrats, welfare sluts and foreign immivaders who are violently opposed to the interests of legacy White Americans.
If Hillary sees Libya as her enemy, she has the right to advocate violence against Libya. If the Left sees Trump as an enemy, they can advocate violence against Trump.
MTG seems to blame the media for America’s division. MTG is rather stupid to simply blame the media when a shitty government that screws its citizens is largely to blame for division, hatred and occasional violence.
People have a right to be pissed off and use violent speech against such a terrible government like present day USA. The US government should be removed from the Earth for its numerous crimes. Violent speech is free speech
Video Link
End read.
Agreed. However, your statement needs to be finished.
Hillary has the right to advocate for violence against Libya, but no one, individual or collective, has the right to initiate violence against Libya. Same goes for the Left and Trump. Speaking is one thing, acting on the words spoken is something else.
In the end, while someone may encourage violent behavior through speech, the ones who are primarily responsible for the violence which ensues are those who act violently. Those who pull the trigger which kills someone else are more culpable than those who incited them to do so. This, however, does not mean that those who speak for violence are not responsible in some measure. In fact, those who endorse and encourage violence against others ought to be called out and held accountable, not for the act of violence, but for their sordid manipulation of others who follow through on their words.
This is comparable to blaming the entertainment industry, television, and Hollywood for all the gun-related deaths in America, which conservatives often do. I have made the connection myself, yet keep coming back to the question of where free speech is acceptable and where it is not. Where is the line to be drawn? If any speech is found to be unacceptable, then the 1st Amendment is invalid and free speech becomes a matter of subjectivity.
The only lasting solution to this problem is not to restrict the free exercise of speech nor to force social compliance through legislation (which is violence in itself), but to develop one’s own self-control so that the speech itself is ignored and never, ever acted on. This cannot be accomplished in a collective sense, but must be implemented on the individual level, with each and every person coming to the understanding. Everything else is simply posturing.