Shooting Trump with Words, then with Bullets

It’s a club of the most hated. The national leaders who are vilified without limit by the mainstream media.

They’re generally conservative leaders. The media have built up a tradition of legal impunity for vilifying conservatives with reckless disregard for the truth, i.e. slandering them. And with reckless unconcern for the consequences, which include assassination attempts.

Trump is today at head of the club. And the advocacy of his assassination goes back a long way. It was proposed, along with blowing up the entire White House, by no less than Madonna herself in 2017, in front of a media-backed march of a million people. Not one of those million booed or hissed; there were only supportive giggles, the sort of giggle used to express the attitude that ‘this is what we’re all feeling, and wow that she dares to say it’. It was a day after Trump’s inauguration. The sporadic violence of the Left on inauguration day itself had barely subsided.

Madonna said she wasn’t going to do it herself, wink, wink – because, she said, it wouldn’t be revolutionary enough, we need to destroy the entire system. Everyone gets the wink, wink: She doesn’t want to take the risk, but if others go out and do it, they’ll have her moral support. It was mass incitement, in plain sight. But no law enforcement agency did its job of investigating her for this, or the many people in crowd who expressed sympathy with the idea.

Now the assassination attempt has been made.

Who else is in the club of the most hated?

Netanyahu ranks high in the club, too.

Boris Johnson was high in the club until he was deposed. Never mind that it was he, alongside Zelensky, who shamed Biden into reluctantly helping Ukraine survive. And took the lead in providing absolutely essential weapons that Biden was unwilling to provide. He was driven from office, not by bullets, but by a real life version of “A Very British Coup”. (That was the leftist mainstream film about an imagined establishment coup against a leftist Prime Minister.) Of course they called him a fascist, a dictator, someone who was destroying the Constitution. The usual litany. Eventually they found a pretext for acting on their fear and loathing.

Up and coming in the club is Marine Le Pen. Of course she is called a fascist, someone who is out to destroy the Republic. The usual litany. Macron declared himself willing to form a coalition with the Communist Party, but not with her. Note that fact. Communism is obviously more extreme than almost all versions of actual fascism, much less than Le Pen; it was only the unique German Nazi version of fascism that matched Communism in its horrors. But never mind; Macron and the centrists are comfortable working with actual Communists, but not with people they smear as “fascist”. Anything goes for stopping the latter. A coalition was formed by Macron with the far more extreme left, to stop Le Pen from winning a majority. The French pundits who supported this now worry that this all but ensures that she’ll win in 2027. They may come to regret that they refused to let her and her party get socialized into office this year and learn to exercise governing responsibility.

Back in the day, it was Ronald Reagan. They pretended to have liked him only after he was gone. In real time, they tried to get him impeached like Nixon, and he barely survived an assassination attempt. I remember social gatherings at my university where the chic thing to say was that ‘it’s a pity that, after going to all that trouble, they hadn’t killed him’. It was a fairly ordinary intelligentsia meme at the time. Of course he was called a fascist, a dictator, someone who was destroying the Constitution. The usual litany. If you didn’t call him a fascist, you were out of it. That was the social atmosphere among intellectuals, and, in an only slightly lower tone of voice, in the media.

Equally effective in cultivating hysteria were the repetitive declamations, with real conviction, of the absurd claim that Reagan wanted to start a nuclear war and blow up the world. For those who believed in this hysteria, it was genuinely illogical not to want to get rid of him by all means necessary. It was a matter of saving the world.

And so someone in fact acted, in a convoluted way, on the hysteria. And so he was widely applauded for it.

Hinkley’s assassination attempt was falsely ruled “apolitical”, on the strange argument that it must be that way since his political motive – that he saw it as a good move for attracting his love interest, a member of the Hollywood film intelligentsia – was subordinate to his apolitical motive, the love interest itself. The logic was lacking; Hinkley would have never imagined that he could court Jody Foster by assassinating someone else, say President Carter. The false ‘apolitical’ ruling by the media was acquiesced in by most Republicans, given the almost unchallengeable power of dominant media narratives at the time. It spared anyone in either the media or the Democratic Party from feeling any remorse for how they had actually incited it with their incendiary attacks on Reagan.

Before then it was President Nixon. The endless vilification of him had a cumulative effect. The media whipped up a genuine national hysteria against him, joining the street Movement in calling him a fascist dictator. This was even more de rigueur at the time than calling Reagan a fascist later war. They succeeded in toppling him on what in reality were minor pretexts, far less than the quite serious legal infractions of his Democratic predecessor, Johnson.

With this, they did irreparable damage to the political culture – the indispensable software of the Constitution – with its respect for the equal legitimacy of both parties and their elections. They proudly nullified the results of Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 election. Media-Democrat denial of the legitimacy of Republican election victories became a fairly regular theme. It was justified theoretically by a deeply held progressive ideological doctrine: that the progressives represent the true interests of the people; Republicans can win only by tricking the people with lies so they’ll be fooled into supporting the interests of hidden evil powers, and/or tempting the people with deplorable sins.

Every time the media hated a subsequent President — Reagan, Bush II, Trump — they hoped to repeat their performance of driving out Nixon. They felt it was unfair when they failed. They bitterly dubbed Reagan “the Teflon President” when they realized he was not getting badly scarred by their attacks on him.

Nixon passed away in 1994, a hero — to those who knew the reality behind the huge mental veil created by the repetitive smear attacks — of American democracy and American foreign policy. His close associate, Henry Kissinger, continued to feel the effects of the hatred for still more decades. As he neared the age of 100 and his health declined, he was physically assaulted at a Congressional hearing by leftist protesters, spurred on by their half-century-old chants of vilification against him. Capitol security did nothing; it seemed to be respecting the special privilege that is given to the protesters on the Left. Fortunately people next to him figured out that they should act as bodyguards for him. He was spared a heart attack.

Scalise and Turley speak the truth about the assassination subculture

Prof. Jonathan Turley has written a new book on the dual dangers of the loss of free speech and the unchecked growth of rage rhetoric. Turley is a lifelong liberal lawyer, but in recent years has found himself having to acknowledged some disturbing realities about his own side having become the main locus of illiberalism in America. Turley has observed that the shooting of Trump, while shocking, was not surprising. He has listed an entire series of recent assassination attempts in the U.S., attempts that have mostly been plainly motivated by the incendiary rhetoric emanating from leading media and Democrats.

The final word goes to Steve Scalise. He barely survived a mass assassination attempt on 19 Republican Members of Congress. The attempt was openly motivated by the media-Democrat demonization of Trump and his party; the assassin had no odd views of his own, just the mainstream progressive ones.

Scalise knows what this is about. The media never even apologized for its massive labors of incitement that brought on his shooting.

Scalise tells us in clear words how our media and Democrats should be understanding their responsibility for the current assassination attempt:

“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop… You’ve been hearing it for months – if Donald Trump wins, it’ll be a threat to America. All it takes is one person who’s unhinged to hear that, to go act on that, and think it’s their signal to take someone out. We saw that with the baseball shooting, with me, from somebody who heard the far left rhetoric, and he acted on it.”

The media and Democrats need to take their responsibility for this seriously. They need to reform their ways.

They won’t. Instead they are just mouthing their usual evasive mantra when they’ve inspired some more political violence: that both sides need to tone down.

Only the law can hold them to account. The courts have made it hard to do this in the past — ever since the Sullivan test was set up sixty years ago. It gave the media their near-total impunity to slander public officials. It has turned our society into a kind of “slanderocracy”, with the media acting as a new ruling class. It wields its impunity for slander on a pervasive scale. Everyone is kept in fear of the system of smear from the Left; as Nadine Stroessen has observed, even the Left is afraid of attack from the farther Left. The media uses this smear system to overpower and marginalize those who try to correct its mistakes. The vicious circle is completed.

That is why we are today seeing the almost unlimited impunity exercised by the media in smearing not only Trump and Netanyahu and many another national leader, but Israel per se, along with America and Western civilization.

The Supreme Court has changed in the decades since Sullivan. The present Court is perhaps the one serious check and balance the remains against the ideological bias that predominates in most of the rest of the legal system. Perhaps it would recognize the need to restore a workable system of recourse against the system of slander, and make it possible to hold the media to account.