As occurs with every actor attempted act of political violence in the U.S., many have attempted to blame the rhetoric of their political adversaries for “inspiring” or “provoking” violence through their words. In the case of the shooting at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel, many Trump supporters are seeking to heap blame not only — or even principally — on the attacker whom President Trump described as a “lone wolf.” Instead, under a theory long used by liberals against the American Right, blame is being widely assigned to President Trump’s more vocal critics for allegedly “inspiring” violence against him.

This theory alleges that by demonizing Trump with some of the worst accusations (saying he is a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a war criminal, etc.), liberals and other Trump critics are endangering his safety and implicitly, or even explicitly, offering justifications for trying to kill him.

While this framework of culpability may be understandable or appealing at first glance, it has an ugly and dangerous history. Every political faction has used it in an attempt to silence what are otherwise constitutionally protected ideas by conflating them with violence (“words are violence”). I wroteat length hereabout one similar effort, when liberals and various Democrats tried to blame leading conservatives for the 2022 Buffalo massacre due to their anti-immigration views, which were cited by the shooter as his motive. That article documented why this blame-shifting theory is so misguided and dangerous.

That Buffalo attack followed similar ones around the country. On May 14, 2022, an avowed white supremacist and anti-immigration extremist entered a Tops Friendly Market in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Buffalo and slaughtered ten Black Americans. The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, lefta long manifestoidentifying those he regarded as heroic and who inspired him (principally other mass shooters who targeted immigrants, Black people, and Muslims), and explained his reasons for deliberately targeting non-white people (focusing on “The Great Replacement Theory”).

In its wake, elected liberals and their media allies instantly — meaning: before the bodies were even removed — blamed the massacre on prominent conservatives who were opposed to mass immigration. Because these conservatives expressed views about immigration that were featured as galvanizing motives in the shooter’s manifesto, so this reasoning went, the “rhetoric” of those conservatives “inspired” the shooting, and they thus had blood on their hands.

There were countless examples of this tactic from prominent liberals. One who spelled out the underlying mentality most explicitly was Jamelle Bouie in aNew York Timesop-ed. In acolumntitled “The Slaughter in Buffalo Hasn’t Quieted the Great Replacement Caucus,” Bouie insisted (while denying that he was doing so) that leading figures on the American Right — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), then-Senate candidates J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Blake Masters (R-AZ), and Tucker Carlson — had blood on their hands. In particular, Bouiepointed towhat he claimed were extensive similarities in rhetoric between “mainstream conservatives” and the shooter’s manifesto regarding immigrants and “replacement” theories:

Make no mistake: The idea that apparently inspired a white supremacist who is accused of killing and injuring more than a dozen people last Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo — that nefarious elites are using immigration to “replace” white Americans with pliant foreigners —is virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Republican rhetoric.

“This administration wants complete open borders,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsinin an interview last month. “And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it really [that] they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?”

“The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall,” said J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, ina campaign ad. “They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth. Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country”….

Republican politicians aside, there’s also Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News program is a direct conduit for white nationalist ideas, including the idea of “the great replacement.” There are more than 400 episodes of his show,according to a recent Times investigation, in which Carlson has either amplified or promoted the theory that Democrats and other members of the liberal elite (like the billionaire philanthropist George Soros) are using immigration to replace the native-born majority with a new, foreign-born electorate. . . . They have chosento swim in the same ideological waters as the people responsible for these shootings and have chosen to amplify the “great replacement” theory to the world even as it poisoned minds and produced violence….

Source: Glenn Greenwald