Both Sides?
“Violence is never the answer.”
This short sentence was the prelude or coda to virtually every comment I’ve read or heard about Cole Allen’s attempted assault on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The short sentence is patently false. To paraphrase MLK, Jr., the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward violence. Around the world and in the U.S, violence is too often the answer.
Much is yet to be learned, but Cole Allen’s so-called manifesto indicates that he believed violence was the only answer to the monstrous people, especially Donald Trump, wreaking havoc here and abroad. I am usually cautious about invoking Hitler to make a point, but hindsight could justify the benefits and morality of a hypothetical assassination in the early days of Hitler’s ascension. Trump is not Hitler, but it is a matter of degree, not sharp differentiation.
The other common response is, variously phrased, “Can’t we all just get along?” or “We must turn down the heated rhetoric!”
In the aggregate, this manufactures the grandest of false equivalences.
Several times in the past few days, MS NOW hosted Robert Pape, professor at the University of Chicago, a supposed expert in matters of terrorism and domestic political violence. He rambled interminably and seemed inordinately pleased with himself.
His self-satisfaction peaked when he proposed an urgent way to cool the political rhetoric. He suggested that Trump and Hakeem Jeffries join together, perhaps on the White House lawn, for a televised Kumbaya summit, wherein they would pledge to calm the stormy waters, setting a bipartisan example that would surely infect the body politic.
This approach assumes that we have a bipartisan problem and that Jeffries is the bookend to Trump’s frothing and endless incitements and vulgarities.
To once again ignore my usual reticence, Pape’s suggestion is rather like having Hitler sit down with Anne Frank to iron out their differences. This is not a bipartisan problem. It is, along every dimension, a Republican problem.
It is Republicans who refuse to stem the proliferation of guns in America.
It is Republicans who are complicit in the extra-judicial execution of fishermen in small boats.
It is Republicans who support or passively allow the unchecked violence that resulted in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
It is Republicans who slashed aid to starving children resulting in 500,000 small corpses. The cuts to USAID are predicted to cause 14 million deaths by 2030.
It is Republicans who condone the violence against Iran, including the massacre of 167 schoolchildren.
It is Republicans who enable government thugs to drag an 85 year-old woman out of bed and into handcuffs and ankle shackles.
It is Republicans who confirmed angry men and women, like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, to ignore the rule of law and run roughshod over the rights of countless humans, here and abroad.
It is Republicans who assured the deaths of thousands of women by restricting access to reproductive health care.
It is Republicans who deny climate change, thereby creating conditions for catastrophic, deadly weather events and as yet undetermined cataclysmic effects on all of humankind.
It is Republicans who chastise Jimmy Kimmel for a joke, while their dear leader celebrates the death of Robert Mueller by posting, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
I don’t wish for a successful assassination of Trump, especially since it would confer martyr status.. The post-assassination lionization of Charlie Kirk is a case in point. Kirk espoused racist, xenophobic and hateful comments and conspiracy theories and was posthumously honored as a great American.
There are legitimate policy disagreements between our political parties, but I challenge you to cite any Democratic policy that has the direct or indirect effect of harming others.
Cole Allen’s violence arose from empathy. He may be unstable and his actions are not laudable. But they are understandable.
Cole Allen is reportedly a practicing Christian. In pre-rebuttal to those who might find his acts “unChristian,” he wrote:
“I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when ‘someone else’ is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”