The incendiary rhetoric blame game.
The rituals are all-too common. Ritual One. A gunman fires on a crowd or at students in a school, causing multiple deaths. Immediately, media and social media types begin researching the killer. Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Which cable news shows did he watch? What did he write on Twitter or Facebook?
The hope is to link the killer to one side of our political/ideological divide and to score points against that side. But the exercise is ridiculous. The killer is deranged. Cable news shows aren’t responsible for his actions, and examining and quoting his social media rants gives him a voice he doesn’t deserve.
Ritual Two. This time the killer (or would-be killer) has targeted a political figure. The questions breathlessly examined — political affiliation, viewing and social media habits of the assassin — are mostly the same as in Ritual One.
But in this scenario, an additional question comes to the fore: Has a leading politician or media personage made a statement that can plausibly be said to have incited the killer to shoot the victim? (This ritual isn’t new, as the footnote below shows.)
Ritual Two makes more sense than Ritual One. The assassin isn’t shooting randomly into a crowd. He has targeted a political figure. Naturally, his politics are implicated.
Moreover, the assassin may not be acting irrationally. Killing a political figure one regards as extremely dangerous makes sense, in a way.
Nonetheless, it’s something Americans should despise. Therefore, anyone who openly encouraged the violence deserves condemnation. And the conduct of anyone who might recklessly have helped incite it can reasonably be questioned.
Both of these standards — open encouragement and reckless incitement — raise difficulties. The open encouragement standard is obviously satisfied by statements such as “someone needs to kill Trump” or “we need to take him out.”
But what about statements like “let’s target Trump” or “let’s put him our bullseye”? In my view, such statements aren’t open encouragement to kill because they almost certainly are figures of speech, not encouragement to kill.
Even so, given our super-charged political environment and the spate of politically-motivated shootings, it’s time for politicians on all sides to stop using figures of speech like “target” and “bullseye” when discussing their adversaries.
The more difficult questions arise when we turn to the reckless incitement standard. Clearly, it’s incitement to declare publicly that Trump is the American Hitler or even to say he might be. (J.D. Vance did not say this publicly.)
It’s also incitement to say that Trump is an “existential threat to democracy” or to say that Joe Biden is destroying our country. If an unstable individual or someone prone to violence believes one of these statements, he might well try to kill the presidential candidate who is being criticized.
I don’t think anyone questions the legal right of Biden and his supporters to label Trump a threat to democracy (or even an American Hitler) or of Trump and his supporters to say that Biden’s policies are destroying America. The questions are whether they should be making these claims and whether, if someone who takes them seriously becomes an assassin, those who make them bear some responsibility.
Biden shouldn’t be calling Trump a threat to democracy unless he believes this. But if he does believe it, I don’t consider it reckless to say so. The same applies to Trump’s claims that Biden’s policies are destroying our country. Arguably, it would be reckless not to say so.
I have no idea whether Biden considers Trump a serious threat to democracy. However, I know people — intelligent ones — who believe this.
Nor is the view baseless, given Trump’s response to his defeat in the election of 2020. Indeed, the retort I hear most often to the “existential threat” claim from people I respect is not that Trump lacks authoritarian instincts, but that our institutions are strong enough to withstand them.
I agree. But I don’t question the good faith of friends who disagree or aren’t sure, and therefore view Trump as a threat to democracy.
The same analysis applies to claims that Biden is destroying the country (or that under Biden we’re losing our country). I don’t know whether Trump believes this, but I have intelligent friends who do — and not without a basis, given the unchecked mass immigration that has occurred due to Biden’s policies, the left’s relentless war on standards and merit, its attacks on law enforcement, its lack of regard for free speech, its anti-traditional family views, and it’s favored education policies including the demonization of America.
I don’t believe Biden is destroying our country. As Adam Smith said, there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation. However, I believe, and sometimes write, that Biden and his allies want to radically transform America in ways that will make us much worse.
An unstable or violent person who strongly opposes the radical transformation of America might be induced by that statement to shoot Biden or one of his left-wing allies. But that’s no reason for me not to state this opinion (provided I believe it), and no reason to blame those of us who state it if a reader or listener becomes an assassin.
By the same token, the possibility of a violent reaction to Biden’s “threat to democracy” rhetoric is no reason for him and his backers to stop stating that opinion or to blame them if it induces violence against Trump — provided they believe what they say.
I agree with Heather Mac Donald: There is no point in exhorting either side to tone down its claims about the consequences that will befall America if the opposing side wins the next election (or any presidential election). It’s the job of the opposition to warn their countrymen against what it believes these consequences will be. And it’s inevitable that politicians seeking power will exaggerate the consequences of denying them power.
The perceived benefit of this kind of rhetoric — scaring up votes — outweighs the perceived risk — the prospect of being blamed for violence. The violence may not materialize. If it does, one can deny responsibility and point to similarly inflammatory rhetoric by the other side.
The most we can hope for is an end to talk about “targeting,” “bullseyes,” and statements like Chuck Schumer’s infamous line: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
The reason we can hope for an end to this kind of talk is because the benefit to those who indulge in it is negligible and is outweighed by the risk of being blamed for violence.
But I don’t think violent imagery is causing the violence. If any rhetoric is to blame, it’s the talk about destroying democracy and/or America. And I see no plausible scenario in which that kind of talk subsides.
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*After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Republican newspapers blamed “Copperhead” organs for the tragedy. For example, the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Daily Express wrote that “a stranger from another planet” reading the “Copperhead press for the past two years would very naturally suppose that the president of the United States was not fit to live, and that consequently to murder him would not be so heinous a crime.” It added, “the very best defense [John Wilkes Booth] could make would be to produce a file of the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer and read to the court and jury [its] articles [about Lincoln].
It's worth noting that Booth believed he would welcomed as a hero when he escaped to Richmond, even though he was told by CSA spies that Richmond was ruined and Davis had fled.
It's also worth noting that Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley, was trying to impress Jodie Foster.
Political motivations notwithstanding, the primary motive is self-evident: Crooks wanted to take out the POTUS. Whether Crooks thought this would make him a hero, or whether he was trying to impress, say, Adam Schiff, it's wrong to say "we don't know his motive" or argue it was not political violence.
Those who say (I don't care how many degrees they have) that Trump is an authoritarian and that he is a threat to our constitutional republic are obliged to provide evidence for such an assertion. I can give you a long llst of democrat policies and specific executive actions that I believe threaten our constitution, and I also have argued this point with people on the other side.
When I ask them how Trump is an "existential threat" or an "authoritarian" (despite actions to the contrary), all I get is a lot of gestalt theory. He's violated long-standing norms. Hmmm. Norms. Which ones? He's vulgar and he insults people, they say. Unlike other Presidents, huh? He doesn't respect the inter-agency consensus. As President, he is obliged to do so, especially when time after time the experts are proven wrong, sometimes catastrophically. He pals around with dictators. You mean like FDR and Stalin? Nixon and Mao? Or the Shah, or Marcos, or Peron? Obama and Fidel and Chavez? Biden with Zellensky, who has suspended elections since the Russian invasion?
And then they drop the mother load: Well, he led an insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. I have maintained from Jan. 6, 2021 to now that that riot was being manipulated by democrats and the press in real time exactly the way the Nazi Party manipulated the Reichstag Fire. They took a catastrophe and overlaid a narrative so they could use the law to persecute their political enemies. To this day, Trump has never been charged with insurrection, nor can anyone demonstrate an organized plot to do anything other than send electoral votes back to certain states - a parliamentary and legal tactic that has been tried in the past, and which Jamie Raskin is openly planning this fall, should Trump prevail.
So yes, if you believe an idea is a threat to the republic, say so. But make an argument, not a declaration, then use it punish and imprison people when they don't fall in line.