The Last Thing This Country Needed by Branko Marcetic
But there’s one thing we can say for sure: political violence is wrong and does not lead to anything good. It is morally wrong to kill people, period, whether someone is your political opponent, a feuding neighbor who finally pushed you too far, a stranger in a hoodie who makes you feel unsafe, or anyone who has somehow wronged you along the way in life. Had the shooter’s bullet not missed the former president by an inch, it would not have been a successful assassination; there is no such thing. To resort to murder as a solution, in politics or anywhere else, is to declare defeat: the defeat of reason, of one’s humanity, of functional society, of politics itself.
Folks is Donald Trump basically Trayvon Martin
And as they process this incident, former president Trump’s supporters should likewise think long and hard about the increasingly violent rhetoric that’s come from their side of the political divide. North Carolina’s Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor just declared to a crowd that “some folks need killing.” The head of the Republican-backing Heritage Foundation recently went on TV to announce his side was carrying out “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Several other Trump-supporting GOP politicians have histories of calling for the execution of their opponents.
This is just NPR for succdems
It’s easy to call out the other side. But in a political climate like this, the former president’s supporters should realize it means nothing if they won’t do the same to their own.
I’m sure pointing out the hypocrisy of fascists will change their minds. This always works, both historically and in the present day!
The Right Way to Politicize This by (noted hack and dipshit) Ben Burgis
The assassination attempt was instantly and correctly condemned by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just as it was by leading voices across the rest of the political spectrum. I have seen lots of people point out that, for example, more sympathy has been expressed for Donald Trump — a grotesque figure on any reasonable accounting — than for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered in Gaza in the last nine months, and this is true, but it shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that these figures were correct to condemn the attempted assassination … Violence in general should require a high threshold of moral justification, and nothing remotely good would come from this kind of assassination — which would, if anything, further radicalize Trump’s supporters and be used to justify waves of extreme political repression.
If you’re an anti-abortionist who calls abortion murder, you might still think this doesn’t justify the murderers of abortion doctors taking the law into their own hands. If you’re a left-liberal who believes Trump is literally a fascist you might point out that it hardly follows from this that shooting him would diminish the fascist threat. In all cases, I’d argue that the “stochastic terrorism” theory dangerously undermines free speech norms by blurring the line between speech and violence. Let’s not go down that road.
Just because we say Trump is a literal fascist doesn’t mean anything besides is justified!
