The Political-Violence Whataboutism Has Gotten Out of Control
The Political-Violence Whataboutism Has Gotten Out of Control
Nearly as great a problem as left-wing violence is the left’s refusal to admit it has a problem.
You’ve likely encountered this brand of ideological intransigence over the past decade. You’ve probably heard some variation of it from a co-worker, a friend, or even a family member.
When a Republican or conservative is shot, stabbed, or beaten by a left-wing assailant, the activist left adopts one of three standard responses:
The first: The violence is deserved. He had it coming! The second: It didn’t happen. It’s a hoax! The third, and by far the most common, is: Right-wing violence is still worse.
Of the three, the third is the most annoying, not just because it’s raw whataboutism, but because the counterexamples offered are often mischaracterizations or outright falsehoods.
They will stake out any of these three positions rather than engage in introspection. Anything to deny legitimacy to the idea that conservatives deserve dignity, sympathy, or even empathy. To grant any of these would be to concede that conservatives are human. But in the universe of left-wing activism, the right is evil incarnate. It can never be victim, only culprit. That’s why, in the wake of any violence directed against Republicans or conservatives, even when it is explicitly left-wing, the hardcore left, including certain elected lawmakers, will do anything to avoid admitting their side has a violence problem. Though this is partly intellectual cowardice, it’s mostly just a refusal to humanize the victims. The hatred runs that deep.
Let’s look at what happened last weekend.
A left-wing would-be assassin tried to murder President Trump during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
This marked at least the third such plot against the president. An earlier attempt by a possibly apolitical gunman involved shots fired directly at the president’s head, with one clipping his ear. This is deadly serious business.
In a normal world, we’d be having one of those national conversations we hear so much about. We’d be discussing the (apparently) normalized left-wing position that the U.S. president deserves to die. We’d be talking about left-wing radicalization, with members of the Democratic Party themselves offering solutions.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in the one where the left and its leaders won’t even admit they have a crisis of radicalization, let alone commit to addressing it.
We live in a world where a Bernie Sanders volunteer can try to murder the Republican congressional caucus, including now–House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.), who very nearly died in the attack, and an MSNBC anchor will go on television a few days later to argue that, based on his voting record, the congressman is no sympathetic victim. (He had it coming!)
We live in a world where Charlie Kirk can have his neck shot through by an assassin’s bullet, and a left-wing Washington Post columnist will share fake racist quotes attributed to the late conservative activist while smugly suggesting that he lived by hate and died by hate. (He had it coming!)
Speaking of assassins’ bullets, we also live in a world where Trump can survive a sniper attack, one in which a man was killed, two others were gravely wounded, and there’s even a picture of the bullet flying just behind Trump’s bloodied head, and 47 percent of Democrats and Kamala Harris voters will believe the incident “was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him,” according to recent polling by the Manhattan Institute. (It’s a hoax!)
We also live in a world where, even when the violence is undeniable and the perpetrator’s motives clear, your standard leftist will simply shrug and assert that right-wing violence is still worse.
You can have multiple presidential assassination attempts; the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the murder of Kirk; the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home by a pro-Hamas supporter; a Jewish couple gunned down in Washington, D.C., by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine!”; multiple shooting attacks on ICE facilities; a violent, weeks-long siege of a federal courthouse in Portland; “social justice”-themed riots of all shapes and sizes; and nearly 100 crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups vandalized or firebombed since the 2022 Dobbs decision, to name just a few, and the response from dedicated leftists will still be: I don’t care; the right is still worse.
After this latest attempt on Trump’s life, and after conservatives and Republicans asked whether we could now talk now left-wing radicalization, the usual suspects at once invoked their trusty “whataboutism” card featuring the same trusty cast of characters: Paul Pelosi! Gretchen Whitmer! Gabby Giffords! Melissa Hortman!
Pelosi’s assailant, anti-war and nudist activist David DePape, who had been homeless and mentally unstableat the time of the attack, was registered with the Green Party as recently as 2014. He later got into Covid-19 vaccine-conspiracy theories, 2020 election trutherism, and “Pizzagate”-style theories about child-trafficking, making him nearly indistinguishable from your run-of-the-mill left-wing Epstein conspiracy enthusiast.
The Whitmer kidnapping plot admittedly has more legs as an attempt at “whataboutism,” but it’s impossible to ignore that the entire ordeal was a goofier version of The Man Who Was Thursday, where the number of undercover informants — at least twelve — nearly equaled the number of actual plotters, 14. Of the 14 charged, five were acquitted after the defense successfully argued entrapment by the FBI. Also, we should point out that the kidnapping plot, which never advanced past the plotting stage, is a weird comeback to incidents involving actual, flying bullets.
Giffords’s assailant, Jared Lee Loughner, is a paranoid schizophrenic. There has never been any credible link between the attack in Tucson and right-wing political ideology, because the gunman has no political ideology.
Then, of course, there’s the late Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman, the left’s preferred go-to example of a dead lawmaker these days. (The recent reflexive invocation of her murder is particularly gross, so you’ll forgive me for being blunt.) Like the Whitmer kidnapping plot, this example has more legs than most left-wing “whatabouts,” but it still comes with some caveats.
Hortman and her husband, Mark, were murdered in June 2025. Their alleged killer, Vance Boelter, is a Trump supporter. He is anti-abortion. He also claims he is a U.S. military-trained covert assassin.
As I’ve noted previously, voting records show that Boelter once supported Republicans, including President Trump. By 2019, however, he was listed as having no party affiliation, though he voted in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. When he was apprehended, he had anti-Trump paraphernalia as well as a hit list featuring the names of Democratic lawmakers and abortion providers.
It’s worth pointing out here that one of Hortman’s final legislative acts was to side with her Republican counterparts in repealing taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for adult illegal aliens. It’s also important to note that Boelter wrote a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel claiming he “was trained by U.S. military people off the books starting in college.” Boelter also wrote that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wanted him “to kill” Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith because the governor “wants to be a senator.”
“I told Tim I wanted nothing to do with it and if he didn’t call off that plan I would go public,” the alleged gunman wrote. “He said he would call it off or hurt my family if I didn’t play ball.”
Boelter clearly doesn’t seem to be playing with a full deck. But never mind all that. Democrats have a dead lawmaker, and by God they’re going to make the best of it.
Charlie Kirk murdered by a pro-trans ideologue who claimed he wanted to stop the young conservative activist from spreading “hate”? Melissa Hortman!President Trump targeted for assassination by a Reddit-speaking left-wing dork? Melissa Hortman!
It’s not an exaggeration to say the left co-opted Hortman’s murder as a defensive mechanism. They’re not so shaken up by her death as they’re interested in using it as a bludgeon against the right.
A review of Google Trends shows that interest in Hortman spiked sharply after her murder and then flatlined in the months that followed, only to see an even sharper spike after Kirk’s assassination. Interest in Hortman saw a second sharp spike after this latest assassination attempt on Trump. In between those two incidents of violence against Republicans, online interest in Hortman cratered.
Put more simply, they put her away when things settle down and trot her back out whenever anyone rightly notes that the left has a radicalization problem. Rinse and repeat. (Should we really be surprised that the pro-Hamas wing of U.S. politics would use Hortman as a human shield?)
This habit of foisting questionable or outright flimsy examples of supposed right-wing violence is a favorite tactic of Democrats and those within their ideological orbit. You’ve probably heard by now mentions of a study by the Anti-Defamation League claiming that the right is responsible for nearly all political violence since at least 2015. This claim is true — if you believe, as the study’s authors do, that prison gangs and prison-gang-related violence should be lumped into the “right-wing” column while no other group is held similarly responsible for either type of violence. Like the examples involving Paul Pelosi and company, the study’s central thesis works only if you massage the details.
But if you have to fudge the numbers, do you really believe what you’re saying?
Speaking of fudging the numbers, another viral left-wing response to the latest Trump assassination attempt has been to invoke the “eleven” such attempts against former President Obama.
Eleven attempts? I don’t recall even one serious attempt aside from the ricin letter and those bullets shot into the White House while Obama was en route to Hawaii. I don’t recall ever seeing Obama crouched low and hustled out of an arena or ballroom by swarms of security guards. I certainly don’t remember anyone ever jumping security barriers and rushing Obama on stage.
Then you dig into the list of the “eleven assassination plots” invoked by wingers such as former HuffPo senior political reporter Laura Bassett and one-time media darling and failed congressional candidate Rebekah Jones, and you find that the list includes, among other things, a plot to use a death ray on Obama and lots of talk from people who never made it out of the plotting stage.
But if we’re using these kinds of examples as the measure, wouldn’t Trump still have far more threats, especially considering he has been directly targeted by Iran?
This is stupid.
There’s no need to compare who has been threatened more. The only reason these people are doing it is that it allows them to talk around the fact that the left is home to people who’ve taken concrete action to kill a Republican president.
Amid all these deflections and even defenses of left-wing violence, you’ve probably also heard well-meaning people seek the polite but false position that “both sides” have a violence problem.
This is nonsense. There is right-wing violence, yes, but to slough it off with a “pox on both houses” attitude is ignorance if not outright cowardice.
Ask any ordinary Republican legislator how far right is too far right, and he’ll give you names: Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, etc. Demand that a Republican apologize for acts of right-wing violence, and he’ll almost certainly do it. As for the conservative commentariat: it’s still locked in a yearslong civil war over who belongs in the tent.
Meanwhile, you can’t even get Democrats to condemn a nepo-baby streamer who believes, among other things, that communism is great, that Mao did nothing wrong, that the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson got what he deserved, that theft is good, and that Jews are “inbred” “pig-dogs.” These same people aren’t even embarrassed to support a Maine Senate candidate who, until very recently, had an SS “death’s head” tattoo prominently displayed on his chest.
In the wake of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which one woman was killed, Republicans wasted no time condemning far-right extremism and violence. You barely even had to ask. The irony now is: If it’s true, as the Justice Department alleges, that the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center had a hand in organizing the rally, it means that Republicans will even apologize for left-wing-involved extremism!
Meanwhile, a plurality of Democrats and Harris voters don’t even believe that Trump was nearly murdered in Butler, Pa.
The problem with the left is that they won’t even admit they have a problem. And as we all know, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Instead of that national divorce we keep hearing about, maybe we should first stage a national intervention.
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