A sickness to our politics

Half  of liberals now tell pollsters that killing President Trump or Elon Musk is justifiable. Forty percent of young voters think the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO was at least somewhat acceptable, and Axios reports that “TikTok, a top social media app for young people, was awash with comedy over the killing.” Add to that polling data from YouGov that shows 25 percent of very liberal respondents say it’s justifiable to use violence for political goals.

Given that kind of information, the track record of recent events is less shocking than it otherwise should be: Three assassination attempts on President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the attempted murder of House Republican leader Steve Scalise, the homicidal man on his way to kill Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, numerous attacks on Jewish synagogues. But that’s not all. There were also threats against the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., scores of acts of vandalism against churches and pregnancy resource centers, the outburst of destruction in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, of course, the tragic shooting at Covenant School in Nashville by a transgender former student.

Violence does not come only for victims on the political right—Democratic politicians Gabrielle Giffords, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman have all been targets in recent decades as well. But the polling data does show the pathology is deeper and more widespread on the left.

How did we get to such a dark place as a nation? First, you get there when political violence is reduced to a late-night punchline on broadcast television, when A-list celebrities use their cultural influence to joke about murdering people who have the “wrong” politics. Jimmy Kimmel did that after Charlie Kirk’s murder, treating it like a joke rather than a horrific crime. Viewers nationwide were outraged and offended, leading both ABC’s affiliates and Disney to take him off the air for a time.

Apparently, he has not learned or intentionally ignored the lesson of that experience, with a sick laugh line about Melania Trump radiating with “a glow like an expectant widow” during his faked address to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on a show last month, shortly before one crazed Kamala Harris supporter tried to make her widowhood a reality that weekend.

The first lady called for ABC to “take a stand” and take Kimmel off the air, saying, his “hateful and violent rhetoric” “deepens the political sickness within America.” ABC declined the invitation—no surprise there—and Kimmel waved it away as a joke about their age difference. In other words, Kimmel suffered no immediate consequences for a joke Johnny Carson would never tell.

The left also creates permission structures for political violence when it constantly refers to President Trump as a reincarnated Hitler, a tyrant, dictator, or autocrat. We rightly lift up men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose support for a conspiracy to kill Hitler eventually led to his execution in a concentration camp. Indeed, Tom Cruise even stars in the movie Valkyrie (2008) as the admirable and heroic Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who delivered the bomb intended to end Hitler. The plot failed, obviously, but the movie proves the point that our culture approves of targeted action to end Hitler’s life. If Trump is constantly called the new Hitler, can we be surprised that the same message attains?

When the Jan. 6 protestors turned into an ugly mob, the newly minted Biden Administration used that as an excuse to open investigations into “right-wing extremism,” employing significant law enforcement resources often relying on discredited Southern Poverty Law Center information. The Biden Administration doubled investment in investigations of “domestic terrorism” as part of implementing a “national strategy” to counter the supposed threat. That led to a law enforcement culture where traditionalist Catholics were investigated by the FBI, parents were labeled domestic terrorists by school boards, and mainstream pro-life groups were briefed as terrorist threats against a U.S. Army base. Now we see from the historical record that it was actually pro-abortion advocates who caused far more damage and disruption post-Dobbs than pro-life groups.

There is a sickness to our politics. Every few months the cancer of political violence returns in a new incident that should be shocking. Yet we’ve collectively reached the point where an assassination attempt on the president of the United States is now just part of the news cycle, and we’ve all moved on just a few weeks afterwards. Our country lived through a terrible trio of assassinations when John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were all slain within a few years in the 1960s. Let us pray that this current moment comes to a close soon, and without further tragedy.