In the wake of the attempted assassination of the President at the White House Correspondence Dinner, held at the ballroom of the Hilton in Washington, DC, on Saturday, Progressives have been out in force, citing instances of inflammatory rhetoric on the right to manufacture the perception that this is a problem on both sides of the political spectrum. “If the right wants the left to tone down the rhetoric, then the right needs to tone down its rhetoric.” That’s a false equivalency. Even if it weren’t, citing right-wing rhetoric is a deflection.
It’s ironic in light of deflection that the progressives just got caught red-handed manufacturing right-wing extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the far-right to organize the “Unite the Right” rally. Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters at that event. Trump’s Justice Department charged Fields with hate crimes, secured a guilty plea, and sentenced him to life in federal prison.
Even without Charlottesville, the premise of the progressive argument is bogus. So what if some right-winger not on the SPLC payroll says that Barack Obama is a communist? Was such rhetoric normalized by academic institutions, the Culture Industry, mass media, and the Republican Party? No, it wasn’t. Will the Obama presidency be remembered for multiple attempts on a president’s life? No, it won’t. Desperate for equivalency, some social media users are trying to manufacture such memories. But the criteria they use only prove the point.
Anti-Trump rhetoric—he’s a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a pedophile, a rapist, a king—is relentless and ubiquitous and has been for a decade. Comedians, social media profiles, public school teachers, pundits, and politicians openly wish for the man’s death (and the President isn’t the only target of lethal woke desire). They’re disappointed when the gunmen they arm and aim fail in their designated task. (A school teacher up here in Wisconsin was just suspended for imploring potential Trump assassins to improve their aim.)
Compare the anti-tax rallies of the Tea Party or protests surrounding the Affordable Care Act to anti-Trump hysteria. There is no comparison. An anti-tax rally is as American as apple pie. Calling for the death of an American president is madness. Progressives put conservative leaders in the crosshairs, then mock their widows. If Erika Kirk doesn’t cry, she’s not properly grieving. If she does cry, she’s a grifter. Seeing Kirk’s widow rush from the WHCD in terror delighted them.
Stochastic terrorism is not merely a matter of isolated inflammatory statements or scattered criticisms of a political figure that may theoretically inspire a lone actor. Stochastic terrorism arises from an overwhelming ubiquity of relentless, normalized rhetoric—broadcast across media, echoed by institutions, celebrities, and political leaders—that systematically dehumanizes and frames a target as an existential threat to the nation itself.
This pervasive atmosphere creates a subjective reality in which certain individuals come to believe that drastic, even violent action is not only justified but morally necessary to “save democracy” or avert catastrophe. In a country where tens of millions of citizens are conditioned to believe the messaging, it’s expected that some will take up weapons and perpetrate violence. That’s the point. Progressives know what they’re doing.
It’s naïve to believe that the alarming overrepresentation of trans-identifying individuals in lethal violence is not driven in part by the ubiquity of rhetoric around “transphobia and “transgenocide.” Such language manufactures hysteria and weaponizes mental illness for political ends.
Predictably, a population of disordered personalities conditioned to believe that questioning their delusion is an existential threat takes up rifles and enters schools and churches and murders “the enemy.” The rhetoric arms and aims them at the selected targets. That’s why you aren’t supposed to read their manifestos.
Likewise, the ubiquity of “white privilege” rhetoric motivates black actors to seek reparations on the streets of America through burglary, robbery, and theft targeting whites, or, en masse, take to the streets and topple statues, burn buildings, and assault civilians and law enforcement. Primitive rebellion is organized by manufactured resentment.
The situation requires brutal honesty. The point of anti-Trump rhetoric, just as with the rhetoric of “transgenocide” or “white privilege,” is to produce extremist attitudes and then channel them for ideological and political purposes. The left constructed the “oppressor/perpetrator vs. oppressed/victim” frame to dispossess segments of the population of their capacity to reason, to deny the rights of some individuals to life, liberty, and happiness, and increase the likelihood of violent action against them in myriad forms—assassination, mobbing, and terrorism.
Pointing to a handful of sarcastic or critical remarks from the other side misses the distinction entirely: stochastic terrorism thrives on cultural dominance and saturation, not sporadic opposition. It’s the goal of progressive forces to create a climate where stochastic terrorism is the predictable result. Targeted violence is what progressives desire. The pattern is obvious. And they say it out loud.
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This is the left today. They take selected stills from the WHCD event and portray administration officials as cowards. We can plainly see Stephen Miller refusing to abandon his pregnant wife, shielding her with his own body from potential bullets as the Secret Service escorts them both to safety. In the mind of the woke progressive, Miller is using her and his unborn child as human shields.
Allusions are made to Stephen King’s Dead Zone. At a campaign rally, the politician Greg Stillson grabs a child to shield himself from the self-appointed savior of democracy, Johnny Smith. Smith foresees Stillson, future president, triggering the apocalypse. Such allusions only amplify the justification to assassinate the President. Smith is the assassin progressives aspire to be. They believe they, too, have the gift of precognition.
RFK Jr. doesn’t duck, run, or take cover. He sits calmly, observing what’s happening in the room. His soldier instincts kicked in, Pete Hegseth moved toward the danger rather than away from it. The President himself, despite stumbling, appears unfazed. He watches the room from backstage. To add to the noise, social media users recycle a scare from a few years ago in which Trump is startled by the reaction of Secret Service agents. But the clip doesn’t show a cowering president. Trump surely wasn’t cowering after having been struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He stood up, pumped his fist in the air, and led the crowd in a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Some on the left and the right claim Saturday Night was a “false flag.” The astonished looks on the First Lady’s face and on the face of the event’s organizer, with Trump smirking between them, telegraph a staged assassination attempt to justify the President’s White House ballroom. Back in reality, a mentalist was on the dais performing for the First Couple. The ladies were visibly amazed by the trick. The President, familiar with the illusion, was simply enjoying his wife’s reaction—until the gunshots rang out.
They see evidence of the false flag in White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s remark to Fox News host Jimmy Failla, previewing President Trump’s speech, that there will be “shots fired.” To everyone living beyond madness, the phrase is a common idiom for verbal jabs. Those on Planet Madness are not just social media users. Major media outlets are suggesting that Leavitt had foreknowledge of what would unfold.
They saw evidence of the false flag in the many tweets about the need for a secure ballroom at the White House, as if the necessity for a secure ballroom—and the shelter beneath it—were not obvious in what just occurred. I, too, noted the obvious on social media. The Hilton is not a safe venue; it has rooms above it where bombs could potentially be planted, and once guests check in, they have free rein of the hotel.
Past presidents have wanted a ballroom at the White House. Trump is finally building one. Indeed, that’s why progressives hate Donald Trump so intensely: he is a builder. Builders are the chief enemies of destroyers. Trump confronts decay. Repairing the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial enrages those who seek the decline of the American Republic.
In the post-event press conference, Trump was asked why there have been so many assassination attempts on his life. The President stated the obvious: because he is consequential. That’s not ego-tripping; it’s an honest assessment. The left itself confirms the assessment by losing its mind over the fact that Trump occupies the White House. His reelection sent them over the edge. If he were not consequential, if he were status quo, the last several years would be rather uneventful. And Iran would have a nuclear weapon.
It’s not the first time Democrats have lost their minds over a consequential president. John Wilkes Booth and his team of conspirators lost theirs. In Lincoln’s case, the assassin succeeded, and America lost a great president. The insecurity of Ford’s Theatre made Booth’s work tragically easy. Like Cole Thomas Allen, John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat.
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You’ve heard that right-wing violence is more prevalent than left-wing violence. It’s almost always the case that you hear this claim in the context of left-wing violence. Some leftist shoots up a place, or tries to assassinate the President, or murders a conservative influencer, and the media compulsively attempts to downplay it by talking about right-wing violence. This is an established pattern.
This is obviously a deflection. But it isn’t merely an attempt to downplay left-wing violence. It is an attempt to put in the minds of the audience the false notion that right-wing violence is the problem society must focus on. Moreover, right-wing violence justifies left-wing violence. From a left-wing standpoint, once a politics or a person is designated fascist, then violence is justified against that politics or person. Any opinion uttered by a fascist is not merely to be dismissed out of hand, but the person uttering the opinion is properly subject to repression.
Readers may recognize this as DARVO, an acronym standing for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a common manipulation tactic used by abusers to evade accountability when confronted. The idea was developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe the act of denying wrongdoing, attacking the accuser, and reversing roles to portray the perpetrator as the victim. The deflection piece is thus highly revealing: it is the action of a perpetrator attempting to project his guilt onto the victim, or, more generally, those who identify with perpetrators of left-wing or other desirable violence seeking to absolve allies of their guilt.
Imagine discussing a murder case. Somebody comes along and says, “What about this other murder?” What about it? “There are other murders, too, you know.” Sure. But we’re talking about this murder. Why does this person want to talk about other murders and not this murder? One hears this type of deflection in discussions about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. “White males commit violent crime, too.” True. But what’s your point? We’re talking about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. That’s a problem. Why don’t you want to talk about it? Or, more to the point, why don’t you want me talking about it?
Such deflections signal an interest in protecting the reputations of perpetrators in the case at hand by manufacturing a false equivalency or excusing their violence. There is no equivalency, and this is the point they’re so desperate to obscure. The sides are not the same. Once the false equivalency is blown up and once the excuses are rejected, one sees that they’re effectively saying that left-wing violence is a good thing. The fact that we’re really only talking about right-wing violence when left-wing violence happens falsifies the claim that right-wing violence is worse than left-wing violence. This is what gives the game away.
Advocates of left-wing violence recognize that acknowledging their advocacy undermines their legitimacy. Thus, beyond deflection, they practice deception. For example, when people share charts showing right-wing violence to be more prevalent than left-wing violence, if you examine those charts closely, you realize there’s missing data. To see missing data, one has to be aware of left-wing violence. That’s the trick. What about BLM violence in the summer of 2020? BLM wasn’t a subtle left-wing phenomenon. It was explicitly neo-Marxist. You can’t get more left-wing than that. And it wasn’t peaceful. But the public was either told it was, or, as Chris Cuomo put it during the riots: “Who said protests were supposed to be peaceful?”
The BLM and similar data points are excluded or rationalized because honest recognition that the Summer of 2020 was violent—more than two dozen people were killed, structures and vehicles were set ablaze, civilians and police officers were assaulted, statutes were toppled, monuments were defaced, human beings were forced to engage in acts of self-abasement—disrupts the narrative that left-wing political action is peaceful, or that at least violent action is understandable, and that, therefore, the left commands the moral high-ground. Here, the sense-making apparatus is put in the service of legitimizing the left, with the entailment that righteousness includes violence perpetrated by that side. We saw this more recently with the anti-ICE violence.
Here’s the brutal truth: the left has no problem with political violence; some violence the left likes, and some it doesn’t, and that side wants you to focus on the violence they don’t like. They need you to believe that the violence from the left is righteous; tolerance for left-wing violence enables violence from that side. However, anybody who actually condemns violence can only claim validity for their condemnation if they work from principle. Whataboutism is unprincipled.
freedom and reason 