The Slipperiest of Slopes
Political violence in America and the rhetoric on the right that drives it
It’s the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11th and, honestly, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about the knock-on effects of the egregious mishandling of that unspeakable event that occurred six weeks before my daughter was born on a breathtakingly beautiful morning while we were driving into the city for an appointment with our obstetrician. I don’t want to think about all the missed opportunities that seemed so obvious and even possible on September 12. I don’t want to think about any of it. But here we are.
Yesterday afternoon, one of Donald Trump's most loyal and vocal supporters and MAGA acolyte and commentator Charlie Kirk was shot at an event on the campus of Utah Valley University.
Before we speak to the broader issues here, I want to point out that, to a person, Democratic lawmakers swiftly condemned the shooting of Kirk specifically and political violence in general.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California, wrote:
The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in every form.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote:
Political violence has no place in America. The shooting is horrifying, and I'm praying for Charlie Kirk and his family.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote,
Political violence is never acceptable. My thoughts and prayers are with Charlie Kirk and his family.
I too condemn this shooting. I too condemn all political violence, every single bit of it. But here's the problem. The right does not condemn political violence, at least when it's wielded against their perceived political enemies. In fact, they celebrate it. They go out of their way to mock or ignore the victims simply because of their connection to perceived political enemies or their political affiliation.
After Paul Pelosi, husband of the then-Speaker of the House, was attacked with a hammer in his own home, influential figures on the right were positively gleeful.
In June of this year, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her home along with her husband. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were also shot in their home but, thankfully, survived. The shooter was a far-right religious extremist and although Donald and others in the Republican party condemned the shooter, they did not say a word about his political affiliations or ideologies. They confined their condemnation to the individual actor. Despite saying what anybody in his position would be expected to say in the wake of such a tragedy, though, Donald could not bring himself to call Tim Walz, the state’s governor. He described Walz as “slick” and “whacked out.” Calling him, Donald said, would “waste time.”
Because this is now what it means to be presidential, in a brief address given shortly after learning that Kirk had died from his wound, Donald said:
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and other political violence.
He should start with himself.
Elon Musk weighed in on Twitter and posted this to his 225.7 million followers:
The Left is the party of murder.
He followed that up with:
If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-MN) said to reporters that “every one of you” is responsible for Kirk’s death. “You are responsible for this, because you are echoing the horrifically horrible political violent rhetoric produced by the Democrat [sic] Party.” When a reporter responded, “How can you say that when we don’t even know who the shooter is?” Van Orden simply said, “You know what, knock it off.” Because it would be a shame to let facts and logic get in the way of his preferred narrative.
All of these statements, made at a time when we had exactly zero knowledge of the shooter’s identity or motives, were designed to pour gasoline on the already raging fire.
So, the problem, as I see it, with statements like those of Schumer and Jefferies and Newsom and many others like them, is that they elide the truth of what this country is facing right now: The fire was started by the Republicans. Political violence and the rhetoric that drives it are almost entirely on the side of the Republican Party, and no person is more responsible for it than Donald Trump. Facing that truth does not mean rejoicing in what happened to Charlie Kirk. Quite the opposite: It means coming to terms with what is driving the political violence in America today.
Donald has almost single-handedly created the conditions in which his grievance, his vengeance, and his cruelty extend to anybody that supports him. Anybody who opposes him or stands up to him or simply doesn’t support him is his enemy and is therefore not worthy of protection. Worse, they are considered legitimate targets of abuse or revenge, cruelty or violence. He has incited violence against his perceived political enemies as well as against his own government and then pardoned those who committed it on his behalf. This is not a “both sides issue.” This is not a moment when we put aside our differences to come to some agreed upon notion about how to move beyond this. With Donald Trump and those who support, enable, and capitulate to him in power that would be impossible. We have arrived here in large part because this country has been purposefully and maliciously divided against itself because of the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Back in 2023, Charlie Kirk said the following,
“You'll never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”
Well, unfortunately, the universe we live in is a universe created by people who actually think that guns in our society are more important than the lives of the people living in it. Unfortunately, we live in a universe in which violence, political or otherwise, has been normalized by one party and one party only. The Democrats should condemn what happened today. Any decent right-thinking person should condemn what happened today. But we are missing the point, we are, indeed, missing an opportunity if we do not take the tragedy that unfolded today as permission to start a broader conversation about how we got here, who's responsible, and quite frankly what the hell we are going to do about it.
And I would add to your well said remarks, that this is the president who has pulled the security protection of Harris, and many other government officials who disagree with him, even some in his own party.
Perfectly stated, Mary.