Bomber Sends Explosives To Hillary, Obama, Soros,
Holder. Leftists Blame Trump. Right-Wingers Claim False Flag. Everything Is
Terrible.
October 24, 2018
ByBen Shapiro
@benshapiro
On Tuesday and Wednesday, pipe bombs were discovered in
mail directed toward top Democratic figures ranging from former presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton to former president Barack Obama, from Eric Holder to
George Soros. Media outlets including CNN and The San Diego Union Tribune
were also targeted.
This, obviously, is evil. Politically-motivated violence
is the definition of terrorism, and this certainly fits the definition.
Yet the parallel responses of some on the Left and Right
has been wildly disheartening, to say the least. The proper response to
political violence isn’t to blame those who aren’t responsible for political
violence — Bernie Sanders wasn’t responsible for the Congressional baseball shootings
despite his anti-Republican rhetoric, nor was Barack Obama responsible for the
targeting of Dallas police officers despite his critiques of supposedly
systemic police racism. Yet some on the Left blamed President Trump and
Republicans more broadly for the bombing attempts. Paul Waldman of The Washington Post
wrote a full piece assuring Americans that Trump could safely be blamed for the
bombing attempts:
Given what Trump has done and said, this was absolutely
predictable. In fact, it’s a wonder that it took this long. It’s not just that
Trump advocates violence against his political opponents — though he does. It’s
that everything about his rhetoric pushes his supporters in that direction,
even if the overwhelming majority will never get quite to the point where
they’ll actually commit this kind of act of terrorism.
The response in some areas of the right has been to
scream, Alex Jones-style, “FALSE FLAG!” For those uninformed in the stupidities
of fringe right-wing thinking, “FALSE FLAG!” means that someone on the
political Left sent bombs to Democrats in order to promote an anti-Republican
narrative. Thus, Frank Gaffney tweeted:
None of the leftists ostensibly targeted for pipe-bombs
were actually at serious risk, since security details would be screening their
mail. So let’s determine not only who is responsible for these bombs, but
whether they were trying to deflect attention from the Left’s mobs.
John Cardillo tweeted:
Just too coincidental that two weeks before Election Day,
as the ‘blue wave’ has turned into a ripple, and the left is losing ground
because of incivility and violent rhetoric, explosive devices show up in the
mailboxes of Soros, Clinton, and Obama.
This is ugly stuff.
We don’t know who sent these bombs. But what we do
know is that the rush to blame the other side of the political aisle for acts
of violence condemned by everyone is actually a demonization technique that
makes such attacks more likely. Castigating your political opposition as evil
enough to bomb public officials gives heart to people who believe that
political opposition must be fought with violence. Not only that, it makes
attempts to censor speech that much more likely — after all, if speech can this
easily promote violence, don’t we have to curtail speech in order to prevent
such violence?
We’re living in an increasingly ugly time. That ugliness will only be exacerbated, not alleviated, by attempts to point fingers without evidence, blaming convenient political targets for acts of individual evil.
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