In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, across-the-aisle finger-pointing has erupted, seeking explanations for the broader increase in politically oriented violence. Yet, while no single reason stands alone, foremost on that causative list is the cumulative impact of hateful and destructive political rhetoric fueling hateful and destructive political ends.
While neither party has a monopoly on inflammatory bombast, only the most ardent progressives could claim that each party equally provokes violence against the other. However, though Republicans are certainly not bashful criticizing leftist opponents, rarely, if ever, do their condemnations equal the mudslinging endured by conservatives in general and the president in particular.
Try as they might, Democrats’ insistence that Republicans are equally responsible for politically inspired division and rage is almost laughable. For in cataloging the hate-inspiring rhetoric of both parties, the worst that conservatives will assert is that mainstream progressives are naïve or uninformed, and the extreme left might earn a slap on the wrist with a “lunatic fringe” designation.
Contrastingly, the list of Democratic lies, exaggerations, and half-truths grows daily. A small sampling of such progressive attacks expressing hatred towards Trump include rants before the recent election, when then-Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that he was “dangerous,” that he was “unfit to be president,” that he wanted to “terminate the Constitution,” and that he “openly vowed to be a dictator.”
If those slanders weren’t enough, Harris also asserted that Trump is a fascist and, as a “threat to democracy,” was “increasingly unhinged and unstable.” To that, President Joe Biden tersely added that Trump “has no character,” and “we gotta lock him up.”
Those incendiary comments were supported by MSNBC, commenting that a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden was “chilling because in 1939 … a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the garden [as a] for a so-called pro-America rally.” And just before the election, an ABC News poll reported that 49 percent of voters considered Trump to be a fascist dictator.
The cumulative impact of such histrionic ranting is enormous. For when hearing daily claims labeling the president as a racist, a fascist, a misogynist, and a criminal, many on the left have lost objectivity and have become hate-filled vessels consumed by any and all things Trump.
And it is this hostility-reinforcing, fearmongering, powered by the corporate media, leftist internet sites, and like-minded others, that has tarred Trump supporters with those same charges and more.
Famously, Hillary Clinton asserted an “important truth” in 2016 that half of Trump’s backers were “irredeemable” and, as racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes, could fit into a “basket of deplorables.” And as president in 2024, Biden identified Trump’s guilty-by-association followers as “garbage.”
Moreover, in June, Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas suggested that favoring the president indicates a “mental health crisis” and that his supporters were “sick.”
Evidence abounds that such omnipresent progressive attacks have provoked a terrible and metastasizing result. Accordingly, a recent NCRI-Rutgers University study reported that “a broader ‘assassination culture’ appears to be emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left.”
And even more shocking, that same study reported that 56 percent of respondents identifying as left-of-center believed that the murder of President Trump would be at least “somewhat justified.”
But there is even more evidence of a false equivalency that both parties equally provoke, promote, or at least accept political violence. A YouGov survey taken shortly after Kirk’s murder found that 25 percent of respondents describing themselves as “very liberal” believed that violence might be justified to achieve political goals. In comparison, only 3 percent of those describing themselves as “very conservative” agreed.
And now that deeply ingrained animus has continued to divide our nation, rendering well-reasoned political discourse all but impossible.
Other than the omnipresent attacks on conservatives from liberal politicians and their media allies, this is so for the cumulative impact of at least two other reasons. The first of which has much to do with the proliferation of media outlets, into numerous, unambiguous, and often singularly liberal biases.
Before the explosive growth of such distinctly focused political networks, podcasts, websites, and print venues, news was the province of a few nationally available sources. And because these services had to appeal to the broader masses commercially, their political commentary was mostly presented squarely down the Cronkite middle.
However, today the masses can satisfy their political hunger on sources fine-tuned to their position on the political spectrum, which acts as an echo chamber niche, normalizing the abnormal and reinforcing beliefs to negatively unyielding extremes.
The effect of such impulsive negation has provided yet another reason fueling hate and political division. That blind faith dismissal of opposing views has created what Kurt Vonnegut called a granfalloon.
Familiar to observers of our current political landscape, that is a group sharing a falsely based “us versus them” mindset, in which members believe virtually anything to remain part of what they’ve been manipulated into accepting as the more positive association.
So, as a perpetual hatred machine, knee-jerk opposition toward political others creates granfalloons, and granfalloon groupthink reinforces political opposition.
As a result, we have become a hate-filled and factionalized nation where voters, in blindly swallowing media-inspired fabrications, have often become self-censoring, useful idiot spectators embracing theaters of the absurd.
Perhaps we all need to step back a bit and remember that a cornerstone of our democracy is the free and peaceful exchange of ideas. Perhaps we also need to realize that there is still time to unring the bell of political hatred and violence. And perhaps we all need to understand that no other rational choice exists.
For just as the cumulative impact of political hate leads to a compounding inertia of division and violence, the cumulative impact of constructively deferential dialogue leads to a closer approximation of truth.
And even though the author of that “prove me wrong” credo is now silenced, his wise, beyond-his-years focus on civil and civilized discourse benefiting us all is the only reasonable way forward. That was America once, and it could be again.
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