Revenge Is Mine, Sayeth The Loud

 

When gun violence occurs, Democrats point to easy access to lethal weaponry, Republicans point to, well, anything else, and nothing changes. This time, though, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump and his accentuators trod new ground, demanding wholesale retribution against “them.” They’ve always scapegoated everything wrong with everything, but this is different.

“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” wrote Laura Loomer, Trump’s new-favorite autocracy specialist, before knowing anything about the assassin. Implicitly calling for eradication of liberalism, his other favorite, Stephen Miller, called it “... an ideology ... which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” J.D. Vance has been conflagrating ever since it happened. Asked on Fox “news” about toning it down, Trump, who once mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi and who pardons violent felons, said, truthful for once, “I couldn’t care less.” The public, yes. But America’s government has never been so intentionally malignant.

“You own this,” raged Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) to Democrats, on the floor of Congress. (Who owns Minnesota’s Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman’s and her husband’s assassination, Nancy?) Later, atop a pre-beaten horse, she fingered university brainwashing. The killer spent one online semester before enrolling in tech school.

One after another, rightwing media declared “war” on “the left.” Disregarding the deaths of JFK, MLK, RFK, innocent Black children and freedom workers during the Civil Rights struggles, Jews in synagogues, the Hortmans, Officer David Rose defending the CDC against a brainwashed anti-vaxxer, and innumerable more, Elon Musk explained, “Democrats are the party of death.” Trumpists say comparing people like Miller, Loomer, and Musk – and Trump! -- to fascists crosses a line. Where on which line does their rhetoric fall? Based on what information are they blaming “the left”?

In detestable contrast to presidents who rose to tragic occasions with words of comfort and calls for restraint, Trump lowered to this one, attacking “radical left lunatics,” adding “we have to beat the hell out of them,” explicitly sanctioning violence. From which his in-pocket DOJ, already promising retribution, would surely look away. 

After the murder, a Facebook “friend” messaged me: “... You unfortunately by your constant negativity encourages a breeding ground for this type of behavior... you are part of the problem with your constant negativity. hatred breeds hatred. Your posts are consumed by hate you view it as journalism but its not.” (sic, severally.)

I’m unworried that thoughtful readers of my column will be driven to violence. Given Trump’s provocations and threats from less thoughtful readers, I’m unsure about the other way around.

Perhaps we can agree:

One: Killing Charlie Kirk was horrible, despicable, and antithetical to democracy, even our dying one. It made me physically ill, as it should everyone, but didn’t. Anger, I understand and share. Gloating, I abhor.

Two: The perpetrator must be deeply disturbed, whatever his “ideology.” Friends had noticed his gradual social withdrawal, spending time in dark recesses of the internet. If, in his disordered mind, he thought he was helping the cause of anti-fascism, he accomplished the opposite. In any case, his actions seem to have been his alone. Don’t tell that to Trumpists, though. They want “they.”

Three: In no way justifying his murder, Kirk’s oeuvre was discord. If my rhetoric is “hateful” (it isn’t: it’s outrage), his belittled everyone not white, male, native-born, heterosexual, and Christian. He even advocated death for President Biden. I won’t list more here. You can look them up. Nevertheless, he ought still to be taking his combat evangelicalism to campuses, alive and well.

The response to 9/11 excepted, events like this have separated Ds and Rs for decades. Despicable comments pollute social media from the fringes of each; but, contrasted with Democratic leaders when Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, Trump and many high-ranking Republicans are calling for extermination. It feels familiar.

Political violence should horrify everyone who believes in democracy. So should leaders suborning unbounded revenge, for the same reason. Trump glommed Charlie Kirk’s murder as an exploitable windfall, supercharging his anti-democracy aims, extant long before. He’s using it, enthusiastically, to justify more suppression of dissent, while MAGAs cheer him on. Opportunistic geopolitical foes are exploiting it, too, as always.

Well-meaning words to the contrary, violence is who we are. It birthed America and has shaped our history thenceforth, infecting, at one time or another, people of all political persuasions. But if the arc of violence is long, in the time of Trump it bends toward the right, by actual count. (Those data have suddenly disappeared from the DOJ website.) 

In response to an unspeakable atrocity, MAGA Republicans promise Trumped-up, scorched-earth retaliation upon half the country, with brutal totalitarianism the intended result. Coming from our government, it’s without precedent in the US. But it’s exactly how Trump is perverting Charlie Kirk’s death, with malice aforethought, seeking absolute authority.

As Charlie always said, “Prove me wrong.”