Brief Words on My Brief Words
A little bit of clarification on my last piece.
I’ve been wanting to clarify a few things since writing my brief post on the assassination attempt on Trump last week. In particular, I want to expound on and slightly walk back the following lines from my last post:
We need to tone down on all the over the top rhetoric that’s been going on from both sides, but the Left, after years of warning about the dangers of the Right, seriously needs to do some self-reflection. Yes, we need to wait for more information to come out, but the shooter was undoubtedly a man of the Left. We’ll learn more about him in the coming days, but the point remains.
I now regret that I said that the shooter, who has since been identified as Thomas Mathew Crooks, was “undoubtedly a man of the Left.” Considering that he tried to assassinate Trump, I’m sure that most people (including myself) automatically assumed that he would be a leftist. But the story is more complicated, and I should have taken that into consideration. His political views seem to be all over the place, and he probably had no firm political views anyway. As reporting has shown, he was both a registered Republican and a one time small dollar donor to a progressive activist group. According to people who knew Crooks, he hated Trump, but he also hated the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and former First Lady (among other things) Hillary Clinton. So, with all the evidence we have so far, I think it would be wrong to call him a leftist.
But, as I initially said, the point remains.
It’s fine to warn about the potential threats that Donald Trump poses to our country if he is reelected, but constantly calling him a Hitler just makes stuff like this all the more likely to happen. The Left needs to realize that they’re just as capable of inciting violence as the Right is, and I hope that both sides will stop with all the extreme rhetoric. Unfortunately, it looks like extreme rhetoric is here to stay.
Now to be clear, to say that the Left needs to realize that they need to tone down the rhetoric is not to place the blame on a large ideological spectrum for the assassination attempt. Again, there is no evidence that Crooks was a firm leftist, and we don’t actually know how much extreme rhetoric actually influenced Crooks. This is why I think Trump’s VP pick JD Vance was wrong when he assigned blame “directly” to the “Biden campaign.” Any direct blame resides with Crooks alone, and that would still be true even if he was influenced by the extreme rhetoric that we keep hearing from the Left. Still, we know that awful rhetoric isn’t going to do anything to help this kind of stuff from happening, so it needs to stop. And all the conspiracy theorizing that the assassination attempt was staged from the Left or that the “Deep State” tried to take out Trump from the Right is completely irresponsible too.
With that all said, I should have better seen the nuance in this matter of ideological casting. Though I stand by my call for toning down the rhetoric on both sides, I will continue to follow the facts and offer corrections and clarifications when I believe I got something wrong. The truth still matters even though the biggest political sides represented in today’s media environment aren’t too thrilled about facts.