Cue the Conspiracy Theorists and Projectionists. Items today about yesterday’s assassination attempt against Donald Trump, and which side is the one that actually promotes violence.
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Well, I didn’t suspect that so many on the right would blame the *left* for inciting the would-be assassin of Donald Trump yesterday. Based on no evidence whatsoever, of course, except the reflexive projectionism whereby conservatives especially seem to imagine that everyone else operates to their (low) standards of morality and therefore attributes their own tendencies to everyone else.
The Atlantic, David Frum, 14 Jul 2024: The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator, subtitled “Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others.”
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.
Good piece. A later para:
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
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Meanwhile, some headlines from my favorite aggregate site.
- Trump Issues Money Beg Featuring Gunshot Image (from Politico)
- Cultists Blame Jews, Demons, Antifa For Rally Shooting (Politico)
- DeSantis Blames “DC Ruling Class” For Rally Shooting (Florida Politics)
- Junior Blames Biden/Harris For Shooting Of Trump (X) (Joe: “Donald Trump Jr., who recently appeared on the podcast of far-right extremist Tim Pool, whose guest Laura Loomer last month called for executing prominent Democrats.”)
- Kremlin: Biden Created “Atmosphere” For Shooting (Reuters)
- [Rick] Scott: Biden And “Radical Left” Inspired The Shooter
- Vance: Biden Incited Trump’s Attempted Assassination (Daily Beast)
- GOP Rep: Charge Biden With “Inciting Assassination” (Mediaite)
And how many times recently have I noticed Republican appeals to violence? The most prominent one has been from the Heritage Foundation, author of Project 2025. Noted 6 days ago:
Media Matters, 2 Jul 2024: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution”, subtitled “Kevin Roberts: ‘We’re in the process of taking this country back … we ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday’”
The phrase comes at the end of the long statement from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts that this piece quotes.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Are there any comparable statement by anyone on the left? Given the efforts by some media, like the NYT, to bend over backwards to be “fair” to both sides, I think if there were, I would have heard about them.
So once again: so far, this early Sunday evening, we know nothing about the shooter (except that he was 20 years old and Republican) or his motives. Yet Republicans compulsively attribute all sorts of motivations to him. While it may turn out he was nothing more than a lonely boy searching for fame, as John Hinckley Jr. was, who in shooting Ronald Reagan, was trying to impress Jodie Foster. People who do these things are not rational.
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More items on this same general theme.
NYT, Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti, 13 Jul 2024: Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat, subtitled “Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to try to short-circuit the election system, if he does not win.”
The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.
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Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
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Washington Post, Hannah Allam, 13 Jul 2024: Pro-Trump Christian extremists use scripture to justify violent goals, subtitled “As Donald Trump is deemed a ‘spiritual warrior,’ extremism researchers warn of the menace embedded in Christian nationalist rhetoric”
To his most zealous Christian supporters, Donald Trump’s campaign is a crusade against “evil” liberal forces that must be vanquished by any means necessary to save the republic.
Democrats aren’t opponents, but enemies to be “smited.” Vice President Harris is depicted as Jezebel, the epitome of womanly wickedness who meets a grisly end. Teachers, librarians, drag queens — all perceived as introducing dangerous ideas to children — are condemned to drowning with millstones around their necks, a la Matthew 18:6.
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Spiritual warfare is a central theme of Christian nationalist movements that are reshaping the GOP by preaching that the country’s theological identity is under attack and in urgent need of a revolution to put the faithful in charge. Their rhetoric has been galvanizing crowds at conservative gatherings all year, and is likely to be woven into messaging at the Republican National Convention, which starts Monday.
(The above two pieces were published on the 13th, before the assassination attempt.)
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LA Times, Robin Abcarian, 14 Jul 2024: Column: The once-secretive right-wing ideology emerging as an overt threat to American democracy
Last week, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley admitted something that might have once shocked his party.
“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation,” Hawley told an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. “And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is: Is there any other kind worth having?”
Conservative Christian supremacy is on the march.
The piece ends:
No one has captured the warped ethos of the Christian nationalist movement better than the white supremacist homophobe Nick Fuentes, who appears briefly but memorably in “Bad Faith.”
“F— democracy,” Fuentes says. “I stand with Jesus Christ.”
Except, you know, he really doesn’t.
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NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 14 Jul 2024: An Assassination Attempt That Seems Likely to Tear America Further Apart, subtitled “The attack on former President Donald J. Trump comes at a time when the United States is already polarized along ideological and cultural lines and is split, it often seems, into two realities.”
The propulsive crescendo of disruptive events lately has led many to compare 2024 to 1968, a year of racial strife, riots in the cities and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Protests over the Vietnam War helped prompt President Lyndon B. Johnson to drop out of his race for re-election that year.
Until now, there had been one important difference. “Of all the similarities between 1968 and 2024, the lack of political violence this year has been one of the key areas where the years diverge,” said Luke A. Nichter, a historian at Chapman University and the author of “The Year That Broke Politics,” a history of 1968. “That is no more.”
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The title is an allusion to personal circumstances, nothing else.
