This week Donald Trump began to sound like the hard-left censors he and his supporters revile. We all know the type. The professors, advocates, and politicians who rail on about “stochastic terrorism”; the idea that heated rhetoric in the public space can inspire the mentally imbalanced to commit violence.
Understandably angry about the second attempt on his life in two months, the former president is now explicitly blaming the actions of his would-be assassins on the rhetoric of his political opposition.
“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate. . . has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” Trump tweeted this week. “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, struck a similar chord. On Monday he tweeted: “Here is what we know so far: Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump. The gunman agreed, and used the exact same phrase.”
Now there is a fair point to be made about the left’s hypocrisy. After all, the Democrats are the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2022 said that a Tucker Carlson segment about her on his old Fox show was responsible for a spike in death threats she received. It was “stochastic terrorism,” she told the hosts of the popular radio program, The Breakfast Club. If it’s okay to suggest that a news segment about AOC is responsible for death threats against her, isn’t it just as legitimate to say that those who label Trump a threat to democracy are responsible for the two assassination attempts against him?
It’s also undeniable that the Democratic Party’s demonization of Donald Trump has led many within its ranks to violate basic political norms because they have been convinced that he must be stopped at any cost. Why else would states like Colorado and Maine try to remove Trump’s name from presidential ballots during the Republican primary? And why would a Manhattan district attorney put Trump through the spectacle of a trial because the former president tried to buy the silence of a porn star?
The problem, though, is that Trump and his supporters are falling into the same trap as the left by abandoning the classically liberal principle of distinguishing rhetoric from violence. When Trump says that his opponents’ words are the reason “the bullets are flying,” he is putting forth a version of the same argument his opposition has advanced since he was first elected to the White House.
Just think of the first presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, in 2019. She promised back then that she would use the power of the presidency to pressure Twitter to remove the sitting president’s account. In a letter she made public to Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, Harris wrote that Trump had made blatant threats against his political opponents. “We need a civil society, not a civil war,” she wrote. (Yes, civil war.)
Once the line between speech and violence is erased, the marketplace of ideas is in peril. In 2020, trans rights activists waged a nasty campaign to pressure retailers not to sell Abigail Shrier’s groundbreaking book, Irreversible Damage—the first to report on the spike in cases of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls. Target eventually caved to the demands of this digital mob.
The dubious argument was that Shrier’s book would inflame hatred and violence against trans people and cause them to commit self-harm. A staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which once vigorously defended unpopular speech, even joined in the campaign. Fortunately, Amazon and other retailers did not cave to the pressure.
One reason they didn’t was that the calls to ban speech on the grounds that it might inspire violence was only coming from one side of the political spectrum. Amazon still had to worry about the millions of Americans who still believed the best antidote to bad speech was better speech.
In the last eight years, conservatives have led the pushback against social media companies that colluded with the federal government to ban speech on their platforms. The right blew the whistle on activists for pressuring companies to demonetize YouTube accounts that did not adhere to their orthodoxies. So it’s tragic that Trump and his supporters would compromise their free speech principles to score a few points in a news cycle.
Trump’s failed assassins are responsible for their own actions. They were not programmed by the overheated rhetoric of MSNBC or the Biden White House or the Harris campaign. To blame their speech for the near calamities of the last two months is to imperil a principle that has made America great since its founding.
Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his most recent piece “Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers.”
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Um... All the man has done is 'return fire' when fired upon. This is just a sample from his opponents in both parties. The man has been shot once and just avoided another attempt by those who listen to the following rhetoric:
Kamala Harris — repeatedly: “Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”
Kamala Harris: “It’s on us to recognize the threat [Trump] poses.”
Kamala Harris: “Does one of us have to come out alive? Ha ha ha ha!”
Joe Biden: “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Joe Biden: “I mean this from the bottom of my heart: Trump is a threat to this nation.”
Joe Biden: “There is one existential threat: it’s Donald Trump.”
Joe Biden: “Trump is a genuine threat to this nation … He’s literally a threat to everything America stands for.”
Joe Biden: “Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”
Joe Biden: “Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic … and that is a threat to this country.”
Tim Walz: “Are [Republicans] a threat to democracy? Yes. … Are they going to put peoples’ lives in danger? Yes.”
Gwen Walz: “Buh-bye, Donald Trump.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi: “[Trump] is a threat to our democracy of the kind that we have not seen.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “MAGA in general — they are threats to us domestically.”
Rep. Dan Goldman: “He is destructive to our democracy and … he has to be eliminated.”
Disgraced Harris staffer TJ Ducklo: “Trump is an existential, urgent threat to our democracy.”
Top Harris surrogate Liz Cheney: “Trump presents a fundamental threat to the republic and we are seeing it on a daily basis.”
Rep. Steve Cohen: “Trump is an enemy of the United States.”
Rep. Maxine Waters: “Are [Trump supporters] preparing a civil war against us?”
Rep. Maxine Waters: “I want to know about all of those right-wing organizations that [Trump] is connected with who are training up in the hills somewhere.”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Trump is an “existential threat to our democracy.”
Rep. Adam Schiff: Trump is the “gravest threat to our democracy.”
Rep. Gregory Meeks: “Trump cannot be president again. He’s an existential threat to democracy.”
Rep. Dan Goldman: “Trump remains the greatest threat to our democracy.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss: “What unifies us as a party is knowing that Donald Trump is an existential threat to Democracy.”
Rep. Abigail Spanberger: “Trump is a threat to our democracy … the threats to our democratic republic are real.”
Rep. Annie Kuster: “Trump and his extreme right-wing followers pose an existential threat to our democracy.”
Rep. Becca Balint: “We cannot underestimate the threat [Trump] poses to American democracy.”
Rep. Jason Crow: “Trump is an extreme danger to our democracy.”
Rep. Raul Grijalva: “Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.”
Sen. Michael Bennet: Trump is “a threat to our democracy.”
Rep. Stacey Plaskett: Trump “needs to be shot.”
Rep. Steven Horsford: “Trump Republicans are a dangerous threat to our state.”
Rep. Gabe Vasquez: “Remove the national threat from office.”
Rep. Mike Levin: “Donald Trump is a threat to our nation, our freedom, and our democracy.”
Rep. Eric Sorensen: “He is the greatest threat to law and order we have in our country.”
Rep. Greg Landsman: “The threat is not over.”
Rep. Pat Ryan: “Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.”
Rick Wilson, The Lincoln Project: “They’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.”
Former Harris-Biden staffer Kate Bedingfield: Democrats should “turn their fire on Donald Trump.”
You know what undermines your article, Eli? Two assassination attempts in two months. And it is STILL not enough to get these people to stop basically calling for Trump’s death. That’s what they’re doing when they say he is a threat to civilization or “literally Hitler.” They know it and you know it, too.
Now, does that mean they need to be censored? No. What it does mean is publications like the Free Press need to do better and start the conversation at its logical beginning: causality. Just because we have free speech and agency over our own actions doesn’t mean we can’t be influenced by hateful rhetoric. Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t killing people because they wake up one day independent of everything they’ve heard from their mentors and learned in their schools and decide to become suicide bombers. Words matter. Influence matters. Our bubbles matter.
Yes, the actions of the would-be assassins are their own. At the same time, people in positions of influence must be called to account for their role in these events. It’s true: the antidote for bad speech is better speech. Your article today is not better speech. It’s a thinly veiled defense of bad speech. In that regard it’s really nothing new. It’s not adding to the conversation in any way. It’s more preaching to the awful choir and validating bad speech. At no point in your article do you say it needs to stop.
The only way better speech trumps bad speech is if influential people like you actually make the leap—however painful it may be—to call it out with better speech whenever or wherever you see it without equivocation.
There’s a difference between censoring hate speech and appealing to its purveyors to knock it off. Every day you have the opportunity to do that. Unfortunately today, you didn’t. You failed, and I’m disappointed. You can do better, Eli.