Double Standards on Violence and Rhetoric
A TALE OF TWO SHOOTINGS
On the morning of Wednesday, August 15, 2012, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Floyd Lee Corkins left his parents’ house in Herndon, Virginia. He drove to the East Falls Church Metro stop and boarded a train into Washington, D.C., with a backpack, three magazines of ammunition, fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches, a SigSauer pistol, a list of addresses, and a plan to murder as many people as he could.
Leonardo Johnson, Leo to friends, was just finishing his shift as a building manager at the reception desk at the Family Research Council when he watched the young man walk through the wood-paneled lobby toward him. Corkins told him he was there for an internship interview. Johnson, forty-seven, asked him for identification, and instead of reaching into his pocket, the young man unshouldered his bag and knelt to the floor to retrieve it. Acting on a gut feeling, Johnson walked from behind his desk and found Corkins pulling a loaded semiautomatic handgun from a backpack.
Corkins aimed the gun at Johnson’s head. The unarmed former high school football player ducked and lunged at Corkins, who fired three shots. One shattered Johnson’s forearm but he was able to subdue the shooter, wrest his gun from him, and hold him until police arrived, his injured arm swollen and bleeding as he watched over his attacker. “It’s not about you,” Corkins told Johnson after the twenty-second struggle. “I don’t like the organization and what it stands for. I don’t like these people and I don’t like what they stand for.” In some reports, Corkins is said to have uttered, “I don’t like your politics” before he opened fire.
Family Research Council’s politics are socially conservative. It’s a national advocacy group that backs “traditional values” and opposes gay marriage.
Johnson was taken to the hospital, where he would undergo a long surgery and a week’s stay to repair his arm, which still has bullet fragments lodged in it today. Corkins was taken for questioning by the FBI, where he openly described his motive. “He intended to enter the FRC that day to kill as many people as possible and smother Chick-fil-A” in his dying victims’ faces, court documents state.
As Corkins told the FBI, the fried chicken was designed “to make a statement against the people working in that building…and with their stance against gay rights…They endorsed Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage and I was going to use that as a statement.” Corkins’ parents told the FBI their son, who was a volunteer at the DC Center for the LGBT Community, had “strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner.” Strong opinions. That’s one way of putting it.
His attack was not spontaneous. A week before the fateful Wednesday morning, Corkins bought a pistol at a Virginia gun shop. On Monday, he rehearsed his trip into the city, talking with someone at FRC headquarters—an edifice situated on a corner less than a mile from the White House. He bought his backpack at Kmart and the sandwiches the day before the attack. He had used an online map from the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center designating FRC and other socially conservative organizations “hate groups” to select and locate his target. He carried with him a handwritten list of four organizations, all “nationally recognized advocacy groups that openly identify themselves as having socially conservative agendas,” according to court documents. The FBI has never released the groups on that list to our knowledge, but a Traditional Values Coalition employee later claimed investigators had told them they were on it.
The story was clear, the motive unmistakable. Corkins told his victim his reasons. He told cops on the scene. He told the FBI during questioning. Later, he told U.S. District Court judge Richard Roberts upon pleading guilty that he “hoped to intimidate gay rights opponents.” The Department of Justice took him at his word. Corkins was charged with an act of domestic political terrorism, the first crime prosecuted in the District of Columbia under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002. Ever.
The charge came just two weeks before the presidential election of 2012. Had it been a spec script for a prime-time procedural, renowned for their ham-fisted political plots “ripped from the headlines,” one would have critiqued it as a little too on the nose—the Chick-fil-A sandwiches scattered behind the crime tape, commingling with boxes of ammo a study in cartoonish stereotypes. There was a readily available video of the attacker being interviewed while buying his weapon—a chilling scene captured by a French news crew doing a story on the ease of getting a gun in the United States. “This is what I got,” the calm, clean-cut man told the crew. “I guess it’s a basic gun for starting out and what not,” describing the pistol as he turned it over in his hands casually. There was video of him attacking “Leo the Hero,” as he came to be called, from three surveillance cameras, and video of his interrogation by the FBI. The crime offered national media a chance to engage in three giant firestorms and pet issues: the policy debate about gun control in the wake of mass shootings; the cultural uproar over Chick-fil-A; and an occasion to hand-wring about the dangers of our overheated political rhetoric and the violence it might encourage.
The media largely passed on these opportunities. In the same way Mayor Bob “Cop-a-Feel” Filner never became emblematic in press coverage of Democrats’ treatment of women, the FRC shooting never became emblematic of some kind of dark threat posed by liberal activism.
But less than two years earlier, the media had seized upon a far less appropriate emblem in a huge way. In the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway in 2011, a horrific shooting rampage perpetrated by Jared Lee Loughner on a January Saturday morning ended the lives of six Americans, including a sitting federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. It left a sitting Democratic congresswoman, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, severely wounded.
But it was neither the good people lost that day nor the deranged man who murdered them that got the most attention in the wake of the crime. A child watching TV coverage might have been forgiven for concluding that the alleged shooter’s name was Rhetoric, rather than Jared Lee Loughner. Rhetoric was the suspect most closely examined. The wounded were still being treated and transported when political blame started flying. A question about political motives was natural, especially given the nature of the targets, but the speculation was irresponsible, and from some, intentional. The same-day New York Times stories on the rampage were headlined, “In Attack’s Wake, Political Repercussions,” and “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.”
Sheriff Clarence Dupnik used the spotlight afforded by the murders of his citizens to blame political pundits instead of the mentally ill twenty-two-year-old who opened fire on a crowd of innocents. “There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol,” Dupnik said during remarks the day of the shooting, before motive or full time line had been established. “People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”
He also referred to his state as a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry,” so he spoke about vitriol with some experience. These comments from a law enforcement officer allowed every media outlet to follow his lead, and follow they did, eagerly. The shooting “set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics,” the New York Times conjectured, as it did just that. “While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, an Internet site tied to the man, Jared Lee Loughner, contained anti-government ramblings. And regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.”
You’ll notice there’s very little actual information in that paragraph. It’s not established that inflammatory language had recently increased or caused the incident at hand. All they had were ramblings on a website “tied to” Loughner, whatever that means. Heeding Dupnik’s suggestion that the nation “soul-search” about this problem, the New York Times and the rest of the Left in the country started its search with the soul of a former Republican vice presidential candidate.
“Ms. Giffords was…among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time,” the New York Times mentioned, again with no evidence the map was at all connected to the murders. During President Obama’s speech at the memorial service for those killed, he was careful to assure the country that a “simple lack of civility” didn’t cause the murders. Good for him. But he also said that “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do—it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
It turned out Jared Lee Loughner was a schizophrenic young man with no discernible political views beyond conspiratorial ravings. His obsession with Giffords had begun long before Palin’s map1 ever existed, a map that he reportedly never laid eyes on. Loughner was not connected with any Tea Party groups, the Republican Party, or conservative causes, nor was he even a passing fan of Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater. He did list both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as among his favorite books in an online profile, but a high school friend of Loughner’s told ABC News that the killer was apolitical: “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right,” Zach Osler told interviewer Ashleigh Banfield. In other words, the national discourse played no role in his deadly spree.
That fact didn’t stop several Democrats from promptly offering federal remedies for our discourse. Representative Bob Brady (D-PA) proposed a bill making it a federal crime to use “language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a federal official or member of Congress,” broadening a law that already criminalizes threats against lawmakers. He was joined by Representative Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX). Representative Louise Slaughter’s (D-NY) tool of choice was the FCC. In the national quest to cool our rhetoric, “Part of that has to be what we hear over the air waves,” she told a New York TV station.
As Mary Katharine wrote at the time in a posting for the Daily Caller, the rhetoric police who count themselves as liberals were “happy to let political speech be the hostage with a gun to its head in their cynical negotiations over what Sarah Palin is allowed to say.” She noted:
It is not wise for a nation that prizes free speech to conflate political speech and violence. Even if there were evidence that a crime perpetrated by a clearly disturbed individual had been inspired by political speech, suggesting one’s peaceful fellow citizens are therefore guilty of abetting murder is not terribly good for public discourse. In the absence of such evidence, it is the worst kind of rhetorical poison. People who deplore the rhetoric of “Second-Amendment remedies” cannot solve the problem by seeking remedies to the First.
Conservative writer David Harsanyi warned about the cynical nature of this “national conversation” on civility with a piece in the Denver Post in 2011, not knowing the White House and the press would prove him so very right a year and a half later. “[T]his impending conversation about civility and our climate of hate is not only a useless one but also meant to discourage dissent,” he wrote. He maintained that it “leaves the person with two choices: Revise your viewpoint or shut up. Which, of course, is the point.”
In August 2012, there was ample evidence that a crime committed by a clearly disturbed individual had been inspired by political speech, yet national media, Democratic lawmakers, and the rhetoric police were highly uninterested in drawing any conclusions from Corkins’s rampage or the map he admitted to using to target his victims. Two full briefings with White House spokesman Jay Carney, on the day of and the day after the Family Research Council shooting, featured a brief opening statement that the president had been made aware of the shooting and deplored the violence, and a total of two questions about the incident. By contrast, the press conference immediately following the Tucson shooting featured almost nothing but questions about the tragedy; most of them hinged on the nation’s discourse.
We’ll leave this section with a fitting bookend: conservative writer and researcher John Sexton noticed something unusual in March 2013, several months removed from the Corkins shooting at FRC headquarters. The New York Times had published a story about social conservatives. Sexton noted in his post at Breitbart that the Times piece quoted an official from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and “mentions the SPLC’s designation of the Family Research Council as a ‘hate group’…Not mentioned by the Times is the fact that the FRC’s headquarters was targeted last August by Floyd Lee Corkins using an address he took from the SPLC’s ‘Hate Map.’ ”
Surreal. In response, Sexton tweeted the following question: “Can you imagine the NY Times talking to Sarah Palin about Gabby Giffords without mentioning [the Loughner] shooting?” We cannot. Again, Palin had absolutely nothing to do with the bloodshed in Tucson, whereas the would-be FRC butcher explicitly cited SPLC as a key resource for plotting his bloodshed. By the way, we take issue with the SPLC’s criteria for designating “hate groups,” but we don’t blame them for Corkins’s actions. We raise the issue to further highlight the breathtaking double standard in media coverage.
When national media implies the routine political speech of innocent Americans causes or encourages violence by mentally disturbed actors, the implied, and sometimes explicit, remedy becomes that innocent Americans should stop voicing their political opinions.
THE VIOLENCE OF THE LAMBS
In August of 2009, a month filled with health-care town-hall meetings, a national chorus of reporters, anchors, politicians, and public intellectuals decided the Republic was going to burn at the hands of their ideological adversaries. This did not come to pass. Despite the presence of heated debate and vocal opposition to President Obama’s health-care law, the month went by with barely a hint of political violence. But you would never have known it from watching media coverage.
“The American right has a deep-seated problem with political violence,” wrote Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall in August 2009. “The ideological pattern is clear going back at least thirty years and arguably for longer.”
Among the hyperventilators was Robert Kuttner, writing in the Washington Post, and promptly violating Godwin’s law:
When economically stressed and frightened people are anxious and sullen, you never know who will capture their fears and hopes. In the 1930s, economic anxiety produced leaders as different as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler. History shows that if the reformist left doesn’t offer a plausible story and strategy of reform, the lunatic right will gain ground even with an implausible one.
Nina Burleigh of Huffington Post raised alarms:
It remains to be seen how far the brownshirts will test their supposedly threatened Constitutional freedoms, but I put my money on seeing more menace and more outright violence as they come to terms with losing political power and the economy in the same year.
Roland Martin, then of CNN, bemoaned “rhetorical thuggery” and a “lynch mob” mentality dominating the health-care debate. DeWayne Wickham, in USA Today, claimed white racism had resulted in an “uptick of hateful public speech and in the growing number of threats by activists who are armed and motivated to do harm.”2
Jamie Stiehm, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, declared with no historical perspective at all that “when long-serving Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. John Dingell are shouted down by hostile home crowds, then we’ve got trouble,” suggesting that the health-care town halls of 2009 had brought a crowd similar to those of the Philadelphia race riots of 1837.
Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters cowered in the face of a “lynch-mob” mentality. She bemoaned the “screaming and shouting down” of legislators and protesters throwing around “false rumors as if they were hand grenades.” E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post called health-care town halls populated with Tea Party supporters “the politics of the jackboot.”
Rhetorician, Heal Thyself!
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in 2011, “It’s the saturation of our political discourse—and especially our airwaves—with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence” in post-Tucson America’s “Climate of Hate,” as the column was entitled.
Krugman, in 2008, bragged of throwing an Election Night party at which partygoers were encouraged to craft and “throw in an effigy” into his backyard fire pit. In Paul Krugman’s eyes, telling progressives to, “by all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy” conveniently does not count as “eliminationist.”
“Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from?” Krugman sputtered in his piece. “Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”
Sure, if you systematically ignore all the toxic rhetoric from one side, it will indeed look as if it’s only coming from the other. It’s a neat trick, and one former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs executed in jaw-dropping fashion at a White House press briefing on November 6, 2009:
I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People—imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.
Gibbs was referring to signs that had popped up at anti-Obamacare rallies featuring the president with a Hitler mustache, which belonged to hangers-on of left-wing crackpot Lyndon LaRouche, not Tea Partiers, but neither he nor the media was interested in such distinctions. The space of just several years had apparently relieved him of all memory of the Left’s protest movements of the Bush administration, which relied so heavily on Hitler imagery that BusHitler is still a universally understood epithet for the former president. The “unprecedented opposition” fallacy strikes again. Evidence:
Vice President Joe Biden, so often good cop to his congressional buddies, likened Republicans to “terrorists,” according to Politico, during debt ceiling negotiations in 2011.
Senator Tom Harkin called the Tea Party as dangerous to America as the Civil War.
White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer broke out comparisons to kidnappers, suicide bombers, and arsonists in describing GOP budget tactics (!) during a single interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in September 2013. These were our self-appointed language hawks in the not-so-distant past.
President Obama himself used the sexual slur “teabaggers” for Tea Party activists in 2009, according to Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise: President Obama, Year One. He called them “hostage-takers” over a disagreement about tax margins in 2010 and the debt ceiling in 2013, while contemporaneously claiming he’d “purposely kept my rhetoric down.”
In the end, our point is not to take to the fainting couch over these insults. They are words, and it is dumb and disingenuous and chilling to equate them with imminent violence. But it is worth noting two rules of thumb. Those who most strenuously call for civility in public discourse are often those most willing to abandon it for their goals. And, as we’ve said elsewhere, the first to say he wants to have a national conversation is least likely to want that actual conversation to take place.
Finally, Obama again in his 2015 State of the Union address:
So the question for those of us here tonight is how we, all of us, can better reflect America’s hopes. I’ve served in Congress with many of you. I know many of you well. There are a lot of good people here, on both sides of the aisle. And many of you have told me that this isn’t what you signed up for—arguing past each other on cable shows, the constant fundraising, always looking over your shoulder at how the base will react to every decision…A better politics is one where we debate without demonizing each other.
Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns. Imagine if we did something different.
Imagine indeed. Rhetorician, heal thyself.
And David Frum, who can often be relied upon to see the worst in his nominal ideological brethren, intoned in his FrumForum posting “The Reckless Right Courts Violence,” “Nobody has been hurt so far. We can all hope that nobody will be. But firearms and politics never mix well…All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.” There were indeed people who raised their voices even—gasp!—in the presence of elected officials. Frum is also correct there were people with firearms at town-hall meetings across the United States, but there were no incidents involving them. Mary Katharine reported in the Weekly Standard in 2009:
There were…two prominent reports of people carrying guns outside Obama town halls. Police told news outlets that William Kostric was within his rights to carry a holstered handgun in New Hampshire on August 11, even at a protest. In Arizona, where there’s also an open-carry law, both Obama supporters and critics were spotted with [alleged “assault weapons”] at an August 17 rally against Obamacare in Phoenix. None of the armed protesters threatened anyone, but MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer took the opportunity to crop out the face of a black man with a firearm, even while asking if all these “white people showing up with guns” evinced a dangerous “racial overtone.”
None of the media elite’s fears were realized, no matter how much they imagined them in their own fevered rhetoric. What the flurry of statements did was prepare a prefabricated justification for pinning any violent act one could find on conservatives and their political speech. Mary Katharine cataloged all this for the Weekly Standard in August 2009: “Obamacare critics flooding town halls…had been called ‘extremist mobs’ by the Democratic National Committee, pawns of the insurance industry by Senator Dick Durbin, ‘un-American’ by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, ‘brownshirts’ by Representative Brian Baird of Washington, ‘manufactured’ and ‘Astroturf’ by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, ‘evilmongers’ by Senator Harry Reid, accused of ‘fear-mongering’ by the president, and been deemed ‘political terrorists’ by Representative Baron Hill of Indiana.” But if one went looking for real-life episodes of political violence to warrant the tone of media coverage, one came up very short, as Mary Katharine did in a thorough survey of all verifiable violent acts at health-care town-hall meetings in the month of August 2009.
That’s the full list of documented violence from the August meetings. In more than 400 events: one slap, one shove, three punches, two signs grabbed, one self-inflicted vandalism incident by a liberal, one unsolved vandalism incident, and one serious assault. Despite the left’s insistence on the essentially barbaric nature of Obamacare critics, the video, photographic, and police report evidence is fairly clear in showing that 7 of the 10 incidents were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics. If you add a phoned death threat to Democrat representative Brad Miller of N.C., from an Obamacare critic, the tally is 7 of 11.
Most of these incidents were very minor. In the interest of fairness, Mary Katharine kept the definition of “violence” broad enough to encompass even the ripping of signs—once in Denver when a “woman in a ‘HOPE’ Obama shirt, ripp[ed] a homemade anti-Pelosi sign from Obama critic Kris McLay’s hands as she yelled in protest,” and once in St. Louis when a white male who seemed to be an Obamacare critic “tore away the sign” of an Obamacare supporter before they were both escorted out by police.
That’s it. That’s the tally of violence from more than 400 allegedly fevered, racist, roiling health-care town halls in August 2009. By almost any measure, that’s a success in a widely diverse country of 300 million people engaged in contentious, sustained civic engagement over some pretty high-stakes legislation. Some might say, “Good job, America!” But not those who were reporting on the Tea Party movement who wanted to find a pattern of right-wing violence.
Instead, they “treat[ed] a handful of distinct crimes as a sign of a rising menace without so much as bothering to check if there’s been more small-scale rightist terror this year than in previous years,” wrote Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, in his June 17, 2009, article “The Paranoids Are Out to Get Me!” at Reason. Walker calls this tendency to impose patterns of rightwing violence the “paranoia of the center.”
For those invested in seeing a pattern, there was a pattern. Every single incident that could possibly augment that pattern became an emblem of the frightening Right the media had fashioned in its reporting in 2009. At times, the national news media went beyond projecting a tone that implied pervasive violence where there was little. When violent events happened, they routinely concocted connections to right-leaning politics with no evidence, as they had done in the Loughner shooting.
Gabriel Malor, a lawyer and blogger in Washington, D.C., has spent several years cataloging the various violent incidents attributed to the political Right during President Obama’s term in office that later turned out to be either apolitical or inspired in part by liberal politics:
“Media assumptions that violence is right-wing are routine—and routinely wrong,” he wrote in a 2012 New York Post column precipitated by the occasion of ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross’s speculation in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting that killed twelve that accused shooter James Holmes was a member of the Tea Party. He was not, but Ross’s casual association of the two with no verification is representative of the media’s reactions to such incidents.
Malor offers this troubling list and explains the tautology that leads to these repeated mistakes: “Media figures sincerely believe the right wing is violent, so naturally they assume that violent people must be right-wing.”
* September 2009: The discovery of hanged census-taker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky fueled media speculation that he’d been killed by anti-government Tea Partiers. In fact, he’d killed himself and staged his corpse to look like a homicide so his family could collect on life insurance.
* February 2010: Joe Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. The media immediately suggested that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Tea Party led to the attack. In fact, Stack’s suicide note quoted the Communist Manifesto.
* That same month, a professor at the University of Alabama, Amy Bishop, shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting. The gun-loving Tea Party came under immediate suspicion. But Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor.
* March 2010: John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security officers at close range. The media went wild with speculation that a right-wing extremist had reached the end of his rope. Bedell turned out to be a registered Democrat and 9/11 Truther.
* May 2010: New York authorities disarmed a massive car bomb in Times Square. Mayor Bloomberg immediately speculated that the bomber was someone upset about the president’s new health-care law. The media trumpeted the idea that crazed conservatives had (again, they implied) turned to violence. In fact, the perp was Faisal Shahzad, an Islamic extremist.
* August 2010: Amidst the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, Michael Enright stabbed a Muslim cabdriver in the neck. It was immediately dubbed an “anti-Muslim stabbing,” with “rising Islamophobia” on the political right to blame. In fact, Enright, a left-leaning art student, had worked with a firm that produced a pro-mosque statement.
* September 2010: James Lee, 43, took three hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland. The media speculation was unstoppable: Lee was surely a “climate-change denier” who’d resorted to violence. Oops: He was an environmentalist who viewed humans as parasites on the Earth.
* January 2011: Jared Lee Loughner went on a rampage in Tucson, Ariz. Again the media knew just who to blame: the Tea Party and its extremist rhetoric. In fact, Loughner was mostly apolitical—a conspiracy theorist who, to date, has been judged too mentally incompetent to stand trial.
In 2013, Malor added the initial reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing to the list. Because it happened on April 15, many in the media immediately speculated it was a crime of antigovernment or tax protesters commemorating either Tax Day or Patriot’s Day. In fact, the date holds significance for Muslim Chechen separatists, whose cause the Tsarnaev brothers embraced.
We’ll add another instance you probably haven’t heard of: in the early morning hours of September 11, 2014, someone attempted to firebomb the district offices of Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver,3 a Democrat.
An investigation determined that the perpetrator was a twenty-eight-year-old white male who held very intense political opinions, such as: “The Missouri congress has been a willing partner in the US governments [sic] capitalist war hungry agenda.” Ah. The dude was a Far Left “Occupy” type. Rather than touching off a national civility emergency, the arrest of Eric King was met with ordinary, mostly local, news coverage. The Congressional Black Caucus released a statement offering a rote condemnation of “vandalism,” and scolding King for his “ineffective means of voicing discontent or disagreement.” If Eric King had been a conservative talk-radio junkie, he would have been treated exactly the same way, right?
Which brings us to another reminder that the Left isn’t alone in pursuing demagoguery for the purpose of silencing ideological opponents. When two NYPD officers were gunned down in cold blood just before Christmas 2014, some on the Right quickly blamed the murders on those who’d encouraged or participated in recent antipolice protests over the killings of two unarmed black men earlier in the year. Perhaps some sensed a chance to dole out payback for the entirely undeserved bruising the Right sustained post-Tucson for a shooter wholly unconnected to its movement. Conservatives launched accusations in the immediate aftermath of the double murder and marshaled evidence of the shooter’s motivations—which were far more obviously related to the Left’s politics than Loughner’s had ever been to conservative goals—to make liberals pay a price for this association.
Some accused Al Sharpton, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and even President Obama of having “blood on their hands,” because the protests had fueled an anticop climate, pushing an unstable ex-con over the edge. Although some demonstrators came awfully close to incitement with disgusting chants about dead cops (certainly far worse than anything Sarah Palin or the Tea Party ever did), we still reject this mode of thinking. Attributing the heinous acts of a killer to a protest movement is, fundamentally, a form of speech suppression. Even if we concede that the murderer’s actions were related to the protests’ charged atmosphere and rhetoric (which it seems they were), then what? What’s the endgame of this criticism beyond “Your political speech, which offends us, is dangerous and causing cop killings—so shut up”? A subsequent YouGov poll showed that a large majority of self-identified conservatives agreed that it is unacceptable for “elected officials to criticize certain police practices in public.” No, no, no.
This impulse is uncharitable to fellow citizens, most of whom are not criminals, and antithetical to the conservative notion that a free people should have and exercise the power to check and critique the powers of the state. How, pray tell, do we limit government power without criticizing its practices in public?
Ask Not What the Facts Can Do for Your Ideological Assumptions
On the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the media dusted off an old chestnut. The cauldron of heated right-wing rhetoric that was Dallas in 1963 had inspired Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president, the story goes. A New York Times op-ed called Dallas “the city with a death wish in its eye” and faulted it for not “grappling with its painful legacy.” Washingtonian magazine declared, “The city of hate had, in fact, killed the president.”
A Washington Post opinion piece by a Texas journalism professor was titled, subtly, “Tea Party has roots in Dallas of 1963,” blaming a “strident minority [that] hijacked the civic dialogue and brewed the boiling, toxic environment waiting for Kennedy the day he died.” The piece also name-checks retired General Edwin Walker as a potent part of this toxic mixture—an irony elucidated by a cursory understanding of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who actually shot the president.
Oswald was a disgruntled former marine and Communist who defected to the Soviet Union. His first assassination attempt was against…the aforementioned famous anti-Communist, John Bircher, and segregationist, General Edwin Walker. That would make Oswald an odd right-wing extremist attacking his own.
WE’RE ALL EXTREMISTS NOW
The Department of Homeland Security issued a 2009 report, titled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, warning of “rightwing extremism” early in President Obama’s first term and giving credence to the exaggerated concerns of the commentariat with exaggerated warnings of its own. It defined extremism so broadly as to potentially ensnare most of the mainstream Right. “Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial, or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration,” the report stated.
The threat warning from DHS, an armed, powerful law enforcement branch of the federal government, was based on the thoughts of citizens, not their deeds. “Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties and a wholly ineffective use of federal security resources,” wrote Michael German, senior policy counsel to the ACLU,4 in April 2009 in a statement entitled, “Soon, We’ll All Be Radicals.” Jesse Walker of Reason magazine also reported that a publication distributed by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a taxpayer-funded organization advising police, conflated anyone with a Gadsden flag, Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty, Libertarian, Bob Barr, or Ron Paul sticker on their car as a probable member of extremist militias.
The combination of these cultural and governmental forces constitute what one researcher has called the third “brown scare” in American history. Philip Jenkins, a Baylor University historian of the American Right, identifies these waves of fear of the Right as the lesser-known equivalents of Red scares. Red scares have a better publicist than their mirror image, in which the center-left engages in the same paranoid furor it decried in the Communist hunters of the past. In red and brown scare alike, not all wariness is unwarranted, but it’s often taken too far in its tendency to demonize and discount fellow citizens, particularly when the government becomes the agent of enforcement.
THE RIGHT AND WRONG KIND OF PROTESTS
The absence of alarm in the national media is as instructive as its presence. When it comes to protest movements like Occupy Wall Street—a lefty amalgam of run-of-the-mill liberals, socialists, hippies, anarchists, and people who couldn’t make it to the G8—the media hardly raised a concern about the threat they might pose to the Republic, despite a slew of quite clear pronouncements about destroying the current order.
At the birth of the Occupy movement, September 2011, one of the group’s first major actions was a populist parade of protesters across the Brooklyn Bridge. They mustered the march, without a permit, and took over traffic lanes. Please cast your mind back to the volume and depth of the news coverage and investigations allotted to the temporary blocking of two lanes of traffic on the George Washington Bridge by some underlings of New Jersey governor Chris Christie.5 Now, we want you to imagine the opposite of that, because that’s what you heard when hundreds of Occupy protesters were warned they’d be arrested if they walked in traffic lanes. The protestors confronted police and pushed forward anyway, yelling, “Take the bridge,” and then were arrested in numbers upwards of seven hundred. It was a disruptive act, but not a violent one. The Republic was not on the verge of collapse, but the same people who decried the mere “shouting down” of legislators at health-care town-hall meetings suddenly had no problem with the much more aggressive tactics of Occupy protesters.
In many cities, the rules for Occupy protests using public parks, police, and other resources were totally different from the rules the Tea Party had observed. In Richmond, Virginia, the local Tea Party incurred about $10,000 in costs over three years to hold an annual rally in a public park, paying fees for security, police, insurance, and porta-potties. When Occupy squatted in the exact same park for two straight weeks in October 2011, costing the city thousands for security presence and cleanup, they were charged nothing.
“The City of Richmond’s picking and choosing whose First Amendment rights trump someone else’s First Amendment rights and we thought—well that’s fine—then they can refund our money,” Colleen Owens told the local CBS TV station after the Tea Party delivered an invoice to the City of Richmond for their costs. Curiously, shortly after pointing out their unequal treatment under the law, the Tea Party of Richmond got a notice they were being audited. “What did they send to Occupy (Richmond)? Obviously, there’s nothing to send to them because they didn’t have (a business license or rally permit),” Owens told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It’s kind of adding insult to injury. We complained about the unequal treatment, and they turned around and piled on more.”
In Boston, the story was the same. Occupy Boston never sought permits and was not required to obtain them, while the Tea Party painstakingly observed the rules. “It’s always a dangerous precedent when the city treats one group differently than another,” said civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate to the Boston Herald. “I’m opposed generally to these requirements, but if they are required of one group, then they should be required of all. The precedent [the city is setting] is, if there are so many people joining a demonstration that the city doesn’t want to tangle with them, then they will waive the requirements.”
One political movement’s speech was literally freer than the other’s, and the difference was based on who they were and what they believed. Ironically, it was the allegedly dangerous, antigovernment Tea Party types who conformed to the government’s onerous and expensive prerequisites to freedom of assembly and got called lawless mobs for their trouble.
Meanwhile, a mere month after the Tucson memorial service and President Obama’s call to “be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country,” it was out with the new tone and in with the old in Madison, Wisconsin.
As we referenced earlier, the Badger State’s newly elected Republican governor was trying to pass a bill designed, in part, to limit collective bargaining rights of public employee unions to tackle fiscal problems. The duly elected governor had a duly elected majority with which to do this, but the political machine of the entire Left in the United States of America was not having it. At its height, there may have been as many as 100,000 protesters in Madison, camping in and around the statehouse, leaving its atrium looking like an episode of Hoarders. Death threats and mob actions were played down, as news reports beamed images of protesters chanting “This is what Democracy looks like!” into homes across the country. Different ideology, different rules.
1 Others have chronicled the many, many, many instances in which Democrats have used “targeting” imagery and verbiage, both before and after the Giffords shooting. That shorthand is commonplace in American politics on a bipartisan basis. It is not an incitement to violence.
2 Matt Welch of Reason magazine diligently tracked overhyped media forecasts of the “race war that wasn’t,” as he called it, at the beginning of the Obama administration.
3 Cleaver, we should also mention, was one of the members who supposedly was spat upon and called the N-word by protesters gathered at the Capitol to protest an impending Obamacare vote in 2010. The late Andrew Breitbart offered to donate $10,000 to the United Negro College Fund if anyone would furnish evidence that either had taken place. Despite cameras and footage galore, no documentation of the offending actions and epithets was ever produced.
4 Um, thanks, ACLU. No, really. They’re not always wrong.
5 Who, we might add, immediately fired those responsible and insisted that he had absolutely no knowledge of the scheme—a claim that three separate inquiries have effectively confirmed.