Violence as an Opportunity to Silence Your Enemies
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Courthouse in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, President Bill Clinton condemned right-wing radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, then at the height of his popularity. He said Limbaugh and ilk were trying to make people "as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate," he observed. "They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it.”
No connection between Limbaugh's radio show and McVeigh's action was ever established, and it seemed strategic, if not ethical, for Clinton, and roughly every Democrat, to use the occasion gratuitously to blame one of their most effective opponents, a man they’d tried to figure out how to silence or discredit for years. Limbaugh wasn’t calling for violence at all, much less mass murder by truck bomb, but his sarcastic tone was enough to get him tarred with murder by the president of the United States.
Shortly before a disturbed person named Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and 18 others in 2011, Sarah Palin or her team posted a map of the United States to Facebook. It circled each of 20 congressional districts, including Giffords', that Palin's conservative PAC was targeting as vulnerable to a Republican victory, with a crosshairs as though seen through a rifle. Mark Zuckerberg's sister Randi, then a Facebook spokeswoman, said that "many people on the social networking site are asking whether Sarah Palin is to blame." According to her, that was the "top question" on the site following the shooting. She was, she indicated, just asking the question. Or just noticing that other people were.
No evidence was ever provided that Loughner saw Palin's map at all, and his paranoid schizophrenia was such that his motives couldn’t be reconstructed and he couldn’t be held criminally liable. So the "blame Palin" movement seemed to pipe down for a bit, at least until 2017, when (after Congressman Steve Scalise was shot at the Congressional baseball game) The New York Times revived the canard, by then a commonplace of their demographic, though thoroughly discredited: "In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs."
However, in the wake of Saturday's attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and extremely predictably, it's not the Times that’s highly critical of the rhetoric of the right, but for example Breitbart, highly critical of the rhetoric of the left. "Highly critical" here means that they hold the rhetoric and the people who produced it responsible for the killing and wounding. They connect them over and over in the same sentences.
This "blame the bad words" approach has switched sides and is becoming even less plausible, if that’s possible. Breitbart blames Bette Midler.
But I'm not sure it will help the Trump movement to disqualify Bette at this late date. It's late to try take out Nancy Pelosi, too, but they gave it a shot.
On the other hand, they've got Biden. As effectively as Randi Zuckerberg and Bill Clinton got Palin, anyway.
The whole of right-wing X seems to be mobilized now in just the way The New York Times was before when they realized they'd hit their chance to shut Sarah Palin up once and for all. It's easy, really. Here's how you proceed if you want to blame Biden. "Did Biden's words cause the shooter to snap? Well, we're just asking the question. But look, actions have consequences. Words are powerful." None of that gets anywhere close to any sort of plausible connection between Biden's words, much less Midler's, and the shooting. But it’s immediately plausible to people.
Why? Because they constitute arguments—albeit of the flimsiest and most fallacious variety—that one's opponents should be silenced. Silencing one's opponents is the primary goal of partisans on both sides. It's all they want, all they are, and it’s certainly the only chance they have to make their positions appear plausible, even momentarily. Silencing their opponents is the only way anyone on either side can continue to take themselves as a decent person, so I wouldn’t expect it to end anytime soon.
Everything that happens anywhere right now to anyone appears to be a strong and obvious reason for expression repression. Both sides agree on that, if nothing else. Where I'm getting to right now is that I'm rooting for them both. I doubt the silence that each side demands of the other will quell the violence, but I do want each side to shut the other up.
It's not like either has anything plausible to say.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell