By Mary Katharine Ham
Friday, June 23, 2017
James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois arrived in a
D.C. suburb several months ago and lived out of his van next to a small local
baseball field, which had recently been reported as the site of Republican
congressional baseball practice. He took pictures of this otherwise
unremarkable locale, and showed up there last Wednesday with two guns and a
list of six elected Republicans on his person. He verified with a member of
Congress that they were indeed Republicans on the field before opening fire,
attempting to murder a bunch of them.
A week later, one of the victims, Rep. Steve Scalise, had
been smeared
by one national media figure and told his wound was “self-inflicted”
by a nightly news anchor while he was still in the hospital fighting for
his life. Republicans had been scolded for not changing their views on the
Second Amendment in response to being attacked, and national media had either
moved on from the story or moved on to scolding Republicans for their reaction
to it.
Rep. Mo Brooks faced the question about his Second
Amendment views just minutes after someone literally tried to murder him. Can
we take a moment to think about how utterly crass this is? Imagine an abortion
bomber blowing up a Planned Parenthood grand opening in Washington DC, injuring
members of Congress in attendance. Then imagine most national news coverage
including this question for their colleagues who escaped maiming: “Shouldn’t
you probably consider changing your views on abortion? Maybe pass some
common-sense limits on it?”
Yet Brooks offered a competent, calm civics class on the
subject to anyone who was willing to listen.
Media Doesn’t Want
to Talk About What Really Happened
National media covered the incident voraciously for
several hours, but within a day, most had moved on to another leak in the
Russia story. Less than 48 hours after a multiple assassination attempt on
members of Congress, there were no media vans or cameras at the Alexandria
baseball field where it occurred. Just for perspective, when Republican staffer
Elizabeth Lauten committed the offense of writing something critical of
President Obama’s daughters on her private Facebook page, news cameras were
camped on her parents’ lawn staking her out for the better part of a week.
When the press was covering the shooting, it was mostly a
gauzy, imprecise discussion of how “rhetoric” might have caused it, which means
we’re in the business of determining whose rhetoric to stifle to prevent
further violence. Wouldn’t you know it? The answer was… Donald Trump’s
rhetoric, which has the magical power to compel a Bernie volunteer to shoot a
long-time Trump-supporting Republican. Way
to go on the narrative assist, there, Rep. Mark Sanford.
The New York Times
went so far as to repeat a long-debunked lie blaming Sarah Palin’s political
speech for the wholly unrelated shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in an attempt
to make Republicans culpable in a scenario in which Republicans were shot. All
of its fact-checkers were presumably engaged in checking the statements of
Republicans blaming Democratic rhetoric for the shooting, because those are
their priorities. (For what it’s worth, I’ve been on record for a long time
about how it’s unwise to conflate political speech with violence in a country
that values free speech.)
Let’s Talk about
How the Victims Responded, Instead
Less than a week after the shooting, there was a
high-profile House election in Georgia—the most expensive House race in
history. The Republican candidate Karen Handel had been specifically named by
Hodgkinson in one of his anti-Republican Facebook rants. When I say named, I
mean he called her a “shit” then exhorted his followers to “Vote Blue!” This
tidbit got only the briefest of mentions outside local news, as did the
threatening letters containing white powder Handel and her neighbors received
days before the election. The powder turned out to be non-toxic.
Hodgkinson’s attempted massacre was not part of media
coverage of GA-6 despite his act of intimidation having clear implications
there. Targeting a specific population for its beliefs usually has a secondary
consequence—to cow the members of the community the murderer didn’t succeed in
killing. Would Republican voters be intimidated into staying home or emboldened
by this attack on elected Republicans? It seems like an interesting question in
a special election where turnout is important and unpredictable, yet it was
rarely if ever discussed.
Instead, the only time the shooting came up in national
media coverage of GA-6 was when an outside group ran a small, ham-handed ad
tying Democratic rhetoric to the shooting. The ad was promptly, rightly
denounced by Handel, but the scolding coverage of the ad went on for a day. My,
how quickly we move in the news cycle from Republicans literally shot to
Republican overreach about Republicans being literally shot.
Handel’s win thanks to the turnout of Republicans could
and should have been celebrated as a defiant stand by free citizens in the face
of an attack meant to scare them out of engaging in democracy. Exercising your
right to vote then celebrating an electoral victory are very healthy ways to
defy a gunman who tried to kill people who share your beliefs.
Instead, in the wake of Handel’s solid win, which
snatched the #Resistance’s longed-for victory, Washington Post writer Dave Weigel scolded Republicans for “dunking”
on Democrats despite everyone’s one-day indulgence of “come together” rhetoric,
as if four hours of praise-hands emoji and super-hot memes on Twitter is part
of the “climate of hate.”
In our hypothetical above about an attack on elected
officials at Planned Parenthood, imagine a loudly pro-choice candidate winning
an important, high-profile victory less than a week later and the news media
tsk-tsking Emily’s List for celebrating that win.
Conservatives
Can’t Be Victims Even When They’re Shot
Finally, to cap the week, the FBI offered a bizarre
assessment of the shooting that ignored the plain significance of all of the
established facts of the case to declare it a “spontaneous” attack with “no
target.” What perverse standards. A Republican congressman is fighting for his
life in a hospital thanks to a partisan attacker, but let’s examine on national
TV several times over how he kind of had it coming because of his politics.
Republicans literally had guns held to their heads, so
they should renounce their rights to armed self-defense?
Republicans were victims of a multiple assassination
attempt, and it warrants half the coverage of the assassination attempt on a
Democrat six years earlier?
Republicans were shot by a partisan political adversary,
so they should be careful how much they celebrate electoral wins?
It all revealed once again the overweening cultural
hubris of the American Left, which has been in control of so many institutions
and the prevailing political narrative for so long, it can’t conceive of
Republicans as victims even when they’re being shot. Many of them are cultural
bullies convinced of their righteousness, and as Reid did, they’ll kick you
when you’re down after being shot on a baseball field. Why, it’s enough to
drive you to hire a giant, coarse, shameless bully of your own and make him
president.
When you look at it that way, it’s not at all surprising
that Handel beat newcomer Jon Osoff, who didn’t live in the district, but
showed up to it with cargo planes full of cash from San Francisco. Democrats
hadn’t paid attention to this district for years, so their moneyed,
white-knight act was bad enough. But in the context of the shooting of
Republicans that very week, the aftermath of which showed media and the Left
indulging in some of their very worst tendencies, it was utterly preposterous.
Voters have been telling pollsters since Trump was
elected: Sure, we don’t love him, but we love Democrats less. When it comes to
the crucial in- or out-of-touch metric, Trump and Republicans have been seen as
more in touch with the problems of average Americans than Democrats have.
The behavior of many on the Left and in elite
institutions this week sent a message, very loud and clear, that not only do
they not “get” the other half of the country; they don’t want to. They’re not
only out of touch; they think the rest of you are untouchables.
Feminist writer Jill Filipovic’s Twitter thread
exemplified the extreme, though not terribly uncommon, version of this
sentiment after Osoff’s loss.
Republicans released a draft bill of the Senate version
of their health-care reform efforts Thursday. Liberal darling Sen. Elizabeth
Warren declared, “I’ve read the Republican ‘health care’ bill. This is blood
money. They’re paying for tax cuts with American lives.”
You want to go that route while one of your colleagues is
still in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound? Go for it, but don’t be
surprised when it doesn’t play in Peoria.
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