Where Were Calls for De-Escalation When Libraries Were Being Targeted?

A few hours had passed since the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, and cable news desks already seemed to be struggling for fresh insights based on the scant available facts. I briefly turned on CNN and caught former Bush staffer Scott Jennings mid-sentence, saying, “…our country will end, our democracy will end. It’s the last election will ever have. These things have consequences, okay?”

At first I thought he might be referring to Trump’s repeatedly threatening that “we won’t have a country” if he doesn’t win the election—a line he falls back on, over and over. It’s what Trump said shortly before thousands of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to keep him in office, the latest American act of political violence to become such an object of debate and scrutiny.

But that is not what Jennings meant. “I don’t know what the motivations of the shooter are. I don’t know any of the details,” he continued. “But I know the rhetoric around Trump has grown extreme.” He blamed Trump opponents, people “dedicated to telling half the country that if Donald Trump wins an election, the country will end. The Constitution will go away, and so on and so forth.” And he had a demand: “What I want to hear from all elected officials is this kind of hyperbolic extremism has consequences and it must end. Yes. We’re all shocked and yes, political violence has no place. Where does it come from? It’s got to stop.”

Where does it come from? Not long after Trump was escorted off the rally stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, an angry audience of rallygoers turned to the people still working in the press section. They yelled, “You did this,” according to Boston Globe reporter James Pindell, who was there. “For a moment, it felt like a growing mob,” he wrote. He took off his press credentials and packed his gear.

It bears repeating at this point that officials say they don’t know the motives of Saturday’s shooter. What little we know about his political activities—that he was a registered Republican who once donated $15 to a progressive voter-turnout organization—doesn’t add up to much. One fellow student who had been part a mock debate exercise with him said he thought the shooter was conservative. Another said he had a group of friends who were politically conservative and some wore Trump hats.

A rush to such speculation is a familiar feature with these breaking stories. But this latest example is particularly troubling: The Trump faithful, and the pundits who accommodate them, are rushing to blame this violence on the same people Trump and his supporters have spent the better part of a decade defaming, harassing, threatening, and assaulting.

Some of the first people I thought of the morning after the shooting are those I have spent the last five years following and reporting on: trans kids whose families have fled Texas after the attorney general accused their supportive parents of child abuse;
queer folks in Idaho threatened by armed “patriot” groups after they were smeared as waging a “war of perversion” on children; a public librarian in Michigan who had a patron physically throw a Pride book display at them; scores of people who live with a nearly continuous threat of political violence. The difference is, when they had to face armed far right groups, when their libraries and classrooms and clinics got bomb threats, when others attempted to turn their community centers and clubs and celebrations into a battleground, almost no one called for politicians to “turn down the heat.” But that’s what is being asked of those people now, who have been dealing the right’s dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, calling it out and pushing back. It is tantamount to asking all of us in the media to refrain from accurately describing the state of terror these communities have experienced, or else be blamed for violence ourselves.

Where does it come from? From groups like the Proud Boys, whose street-fighting apes the SA circa 1933, and who are still using threats on Pride and drag events as recruitment events. From so-called “parental rights groups” who have turned public meetings in schools and libraries into forums for demonizing queer and trans people, demanding educators out trans kids or else. It is coming from people hearing the call from groups like CatholicVote and emptying libraries of books they’ve scapegoated in their new red scare. It is coming from the same people who pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, like Jack Posobiec, who livestreamed himself allegedly busting up a child sex slave ring and inspiring a gunman to follow in his footsteps. Whether or not elected officials or political commentators recognize these threats as political violence, people living in communities targeted from Montana to Michigan, certainly recognize it, and have fought back.

Maybe cable news commentators’ and even Democratic politicians’ demands to de-escalate political rhetoric are just a reflex. They don’t seem to recognize that Trump has been a major factor in the recent escalation in political violence in the United States. Or if they do, they are not acting like it.

Some have seized on the shooting as just the latest opportunity to blame Democrats for something Trump is doing. For example, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claims God spared Trump to give the United States “another chance,” told CNN viewers on Monday that when Democrats say that democracy is endangered by Trump, people will “act upon it.” When host Anderson Cooper pointed out that Trump has also accused Democrats of endangering democracy, Johnson replied, “everybody is prone to overstatement.” Trump has reinforced this reflex, this insistence that his opposition are “fascists,” at the same time as his now-V.P. candidate J. D. Vance claimed that those fearing authoritarianism are the ones to blame for the shooter’s actions.

“The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity,” noted Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept. “The issue, rather, is what picture of ‘political violence’ this messaging serves.” In this instance, we see people condemning political violence against Trump who have not condemned political violence against those he threatens routinely—immigrants, Black people, trans people. These selective condemnations may be hypocritical, but hypocrisy doesn’t describe the political work the condemnations are doing. To offer condemnations of political violence only when the right is the object of political violence serves as a form of discipline, to subdue those who are the targets of right’s political violence and all those who oppose it.