Hitler, Hitler, Bang
why political violence against conservatives is no mystery
Someone tried to kill Donald Trump again last night at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, and we are once again being treated to the great American liturgy that follows every one of these occasions; in which the very people who have spent the better part of a decade describing Trump and his supporters as Hitler and Nazis now furrow their brows on CNN and wonder, with the bewildered air of a man who has just discovered that fire is hot, wherever all this rampant political violence could be coming from.
Let me hazard a guess.
If you stand in the public square for ten years with a very large megaphone, and into that megaphone you bellow that the President of the United States is Hitler, that his election will be the death of the republic, that his supporters are not merely mistaken but are in fact a fascist menace which good people have a positive moral duty to stop by whatever means present themselves, then you don’t get the luxury of acting astonished when some impressionable soul in row twelve takes out a notebook and begins doing the math. He is, after all, only following the logic you handed him. If the man really is Hitler—mustache and all—then the young man with the rifle is not a lunatic. He is a hero of the resistance. He is the courageous Bonhoeffer of your bedtime stories. I know what I would do if I was in his shoes, poor soul. I would pick up a gun and head to Washington D.C.
This is not a difficult point. It is, in fact, the single most obvious point available to a creature with a functioning brain, which is why our left-leaning political class works so very hard to avoid stumbling into it by accident. The senators understand cause and effect quite clearly, despite their inability to understand nearly anything else. The podcasters and cable anchors also understand cause and effect. So do the op-ed columnists who have, over the past decade, exhausted the thesaurus in their hunt for fresh synonyms for unprecedented and existential understand cause and effect. They are not confused. They simply find the rhetoric profitable—it raises the blood pressure, it raises the money, it sells hardcovers, and it books the green room.
It also kills people. It killed Charlie Kirk, who was thirty-one years old and had a young wife and two small children and who spent his short life doing the deeply subversive thing of standing on college quads and discussing politics with nineteen-year-olds. For this—for this, for the crime of talking in public with college students—a young man decided that the world would be much improved by his absence, and acted on the urgent conviction that a thousand news segments and ten thousand tweets and a hundred thousand professors had been screaming at him for years. It has come for judges at their front doors and congressmen at their batting practice and a former president on a golf course and at a rally in Pennsylvania, where a young man in the bleachers came within half an inch of altering the history of the republic, and where a father named Corey Comperatore died shielding his daughters from a bullet meant for someone he had driven out to cheer for. These are not, despite what you will hear, the unfortunate but inevitable cost of a robust democratic discourse. These are funerals. There are children at these funerals. They are small, and they do not understand why the casket is closed, and they will spend the rest of their lives understanding it slowly, in pieces, year by year, while the people who encouraged the shooter go on television to lament, in the most serious possible tones, the upsurge in political violence in our country.
So what is the answer?
It’s not a blue-ribbon commission tasked with investigating these incidents. It’s not a national conversation, God spare us. It’s something much simpler and much harder, which is that the people who have been calling Donald Trump “Hitler” must, as an act of will, stop calling this man Hitler. They must stop announcing, every four years on a tighter cycle, that this is the last election America will ever have. They must stop informing half their countrymen that they are a fascist tumor on the body politic which a healthy nation should cut out. They must return, sheepishly if necessary, to the antique practice of saying their opponent is wrong, perhaps even badly wrong, without insisting he is the worst man who ever lived.
That is the whole prescription, and I think they will find it extremely effective. Beat him at the ballot box if you can manage it. Mock his ties and his tweets. Question his policies, and write thunderous editorials about his tariffs if you like. But quit telling the unwell and the impressionable that he is precisely the sort of man for whom a bullet to the head would be a public service, and then performing shocked indignation when one of them volunteers for the job.
Until that day comes—and I am not, you will notice, holding my breath—we are going to keep burying conservatives.
There is a word for convincing a man his neighbor is a sadistic tyrant and then expressing surprise when he tries to kill him. The word is not discourse. The word is not passion. The word is blood-guilt. It is an old word, it is a word God knows very well, and unfortunately for so many Democrats, it does not wash out because you cried about it on television the morning after.