It wasn’t Donald Trump, or Joe Biden
Democratic
Party officials and media deny that there’s any connection between their
inflammatory rhetoric labeling Donald Trump a fascist, would-be dictator, and
even Adolf Hitler and the attempt on the 2024 Republican candidate.
But
media executives must believe Trump supporters have a point or MSNBC wouldn’t
have given Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski a 24-hour timeout Monday to put
some distance between the shooting and the fare that Morning Joe has
been dishing out for nearly a decade.
Same
with music industry executives who canceled Jack Black’s worldwide music tour
after the funnyman’s bandmate told an Australian audience that his birthday
wish was “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Politics aside, no concert promoter was
going to pay the insurance premium required to host a band that celebrated
attempted murder.
Republicans
on Capitol Hill are angry at The
New Republic after a recent issue put an image based on a Hitler
campaign poster on its cover. The editors claim they weren’t entirely committed
to the Trump=Hitler formula, but, as they wrote, “he’s damn close enough, and
we’d better fight.”
In
a way, left-wing journalists who say it’s not their fault the 20-year-old man
whose adolescence was saturated with murderously anti-Trump rhetoric tried to
kill Trump have a point.
The
media is reactive, not creative. Democrat-aligned media didn’t invent the idea
that the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidate was, despite massive video and audio
evidence to the contrary, cognitively 100%. They just sang from the sheet they
were handed.
And
when Joe Biden proved incapable of finishing a sentence without devolving into
gibberish during his debate with Trump last month? It wasn’t the media that
left him out there to melt like a Madame Tussauds simulation of a living
person. In fact, the media was embarrassed by Biden’s performance—and in front
of the people they hate most, Trump supporters, who have been saying for four
years that Biden is in obvious decline. So, the media reacted—Joe must go! But
that’s not their call. If media personalities had real power, no one would have
dared muzzle Joe and Mika, not even for 24 hours.
So, who created the climate of political violence?
Some propagandists lay the blame squarely on Trump. After pro
forma denunciations of the attempted public execution of the opposition leader,
a chorus of
establishment stalwarts, like George Stephanopoulos, and David Rothkopf, and
others argued that Trump and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same
cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory,”
wrote David Frum, “are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and
democracy.”
In other words, not only is Trump responsible for inciting Jan.
6—the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, and
9/11, etc.—but he has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately
responsible for the attempt on his life.
That’s Hamas logic:
The violence of our victims drove us to burn them alive. Thus, the
left is laying down the predicate for future violence against Trump and the
half of the country that supports him: It’s OK to target them because being “at
both ends of the bullet’s trajectory,” they brought it upon themselves.
No, the violence came from the left. The question is, who from the
left is responsible for cultivating it? It’s not the media, and it’s not Joe
Biden, either.
With the Democratic Party’s internal upheavals about replacing the
incumbent, the left has openly acknowledged that the shadow presidency isn’t a
MAGA conspiracy but fact.
All the party’s chatter centered on Obama, identifying him as the
man holding the party’s reins and directing its messaging: Did he sign off on
George Clooney’s op-ed calling for Biden to step down? What was the true
meaning of Obama aide David Axelrod’s tweet that the debate over Biden’s
candidacy should have happened a year ago?
Or when another Obama hand, David Plouffe, said it was DEFCON-ONE
moment for Biden? Who did Obama prefer for 2024: his former vice president he
made the 2020 candidate or the unelectable also-ran he slipped into the No. 2
slot to sneak her past the electorate when Biden’s malfunctions proved,
finally, irreparable? Was the moment ripe for Operation Kamala?
As it happens, the timing backfired on Obama. The attempt on
Trump’s life leaves him holding the bag. If Obama is responsible for calling
the shots, then he must also be held accountable for them.
It’s no surprise that the left’s investigation into the roots of
our current round of political violence has carefully avoided mention of the
riots that filled college campuses across the country and the streets of
American cities with Palestinian terror advocates. Indeed, the fascist-fighting New Republic now
employs a pro-Hamas reporter. “Good morning,” Talia Jane tweeted over a picture
of Israel’s border being overrun on Oct. 7. This wasn’t terrorism, she
explained, rather it was “state oppression vs rebellion against state
repression.”
In an article for TNR, Jane defended: antisemitic
protesters at a Manhattan exhibit commemorating the hundreds killed by Hamas at
the Nova festival; vandals targeting the homes of Brooklyn Museum
administrators for calling the police on violent protesters; attacks on
pro-Israel Columbia University professor Shai Davidai; and terror supporters
filling a subway car asking other riders to “raise your hand if you’re a
Zionist.” It could have been dictated from a Doha hotel hosting Hamas
leadership.
But Jane’s ideology is not that
different from the message Obama pushed into the mainstream of the Democratic
Party. “The occupation, and what is happening to Palestinians, is unbearable,”
is how he framed the Oct. 7 massacre for his former staffers during a Pod Save
America panel in November.
And this wasn’t just talk. How
did 2024 Brooklyn come to look and sound like 1938 Berlin? In part, according
to U.S. intelligence officials, it’s because Iran funded and incited the
pro-Hamas demonstrations. Where would the regime that arms and pays for anti-American
terror and embodies Jew hatred get the idea that it’s OK to participate in the
American political system by creating the conditions for a nationwide pogrom?
In 2015 the Obama White House
struck an agreement with the Islamic Republic, legalizing its nuclear weapons
program and thereby legitimizing the tactics it employs to accomplish its
strategic goals—political violence, i.e., terrorism. The Iran nuclear deal was
the instrument with which Obama normalized political violence.
Another Obama instrument
cultivated it. Shortly before leaving office in 2017, Obama instructed his CIA
Director John Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment claiming
that Vladimir Putin helped put Trump in the White House.
The purpose of the official
assessment wasn’t just to undermine his successor’s presidency and hobble his
administration with phony investigations sourced to the perverted fantasies of
an FBI informant once employed by British intelligence.
No, lending the U.S.
government’s executive authority to an information operation contending that
one half of the electorate supported a foreign agent to govern the country was
designed to destabilize America. Its purpose was to drive its citizens against
each other.
That’s where we are today,
still. These are the signs of a destabilized polity: the widespread prosecution
of political opponents that was normalized in the wake of Jan. 6; mandating
vaccines and villainizing those who resisted experimental medical treatments;
recasting Trump supporters as domestic terrorists; opening borders to usher
foreign criminals into middle-class communities; convicting elderly women for
praying in front of abortion clinics; dispatching the FBI to raid the home of
the opposition leader, unlawfully deputizing an officer to prosecute him, and
most recently, but likely not summarily, the attempt on his life.
Trump said that, after what he
went through, he couldn’t very well say the same words he’d planned to say
Thursday night in a broadside attacking Biden. Rather, he needed to send a
message of unity—which in this case is a story about redemption.
Americans know how to hear those
stories because we’ve been telling them to ourselves and others from the
beginning, starting with George Washington himself. The narrative thread goes
through the Civil War, catching Lee as well as Grant, and up to the present. It
seemed once that Obama, too, having attached himself to the mythography of
Lincoln, was part of that story as America’s first Black president—and maybe he
will reappear there in the future, rather than leave his mark in the book of
America where it is now, in the chapter of Ahab, the maniacal completionist.
The best stories we invent about
ourselves all partake of the same longing, from Shane and Gatsby to Rocky and
the Hunger Games. May this latest and perhaps most improbable protagonist of
the great American story continue to draw on the source of redemption granted
him by providence.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/who-normalized-political-violence-america