The Violence Is Not Symmetrical

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 16, 2024

 

The city of Springfield, Ohio, is besieged. Bomb threats and shooting scares have disrupted municipal events and closed schools for days on end. The disorder has been attributed to the addled Americans who pay overly close attention to the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, which has recently been focused on promoting the claim that Haitian migrants are absconding with local pets and eating them.

 

This outbreak of menace fits within a rubric the mainstream press can intuitively process. Donald Trump’s supporters are forever “inspired to violence.” They are uniquely susceptible to suggestion, both from the Republican presidential nominee and his acolytes. The MAGA faithful are quick to threaten, harass, and intimidate Trump’s critics and pursuers. As a Reuters analysis published last year asserts, America is “embroiled in the most sustained spate of political violence” since the 1960s. But while some primarily nonviolent criminality can be attributed to left-wing activists, the “attacks on people — from beatings to killings — were perpetrated mostly by suspects acting in service of right-wing political beliefs and ideology.”

 

The second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, which took place on Sunday afternoon, is just the latest event to call this ponderous assumption into question. The alleged would-be assassin appears to be in some important ways similar to the gunman who shot off a portion of Trump’s ear and killed Corey Comperatore in Butler, Pa., in July. His efforts to advocate on behalf of Ukraine’s cause — going so far as to try to join the fight against Russia’s invaders (he failed) — suggest a desire to make himself a part of a mission grander than himself. While the July 13 shooter’s motives have not yet been firmly established, reports indicating that he considered any target of opportunity, including Joe Biden, suggest that he, too, sought out notoriety. Unlike Trump’s assailant in Pennsylvania, however, the would-be assailant in Florida left a paper trail suggesting that he was a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes.

 

That might shock the press, but finding a single Trump supporter who is surprised by Sunday’s news would be a struggle. The political media are constantly on the lookout for right-wing violence; but much of the “sustained spate of political violence” to which Americans have been treated over the course of this election cycle has come not from Trump’s supporters but from his opponents.

 

In July, the town of Hancock, Mich., was terrorized by a lone all-terrain vehicle driver who vandalized two cars adorned with Trump campaign paraphernalia before he descended on an 80-year-old man putting up pro-Trump yard signs on his property. The 22-year-old assailant proceeded to run that person over, putting him in critical condition, before eventually calling the police to confess his involvement in the attack and, subsequently, committing suicide.

 

The return of students to American campuses amid Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas has put an end to the summer respite provided weary observers of the anti-Israel mobs and the chaos that accompanies them. Two Jewish students were reportedly attacked late last month by a keffiyeh-clad assailant wielding a glass bottle. Last week, a pro-Israel demonstration in a Boston suburb turned violent when a man charged at the gathering, accusing its participants of supporting genocide against civilians. The attacker reportedly “tackled” one of the demonstrators, who shot his alleged assailant with the handgun he happened to be carrying.

 

The press most certainly should be on the lookout for conditions that can trigger our unstable neighbors to acts of violence — particularly when the stuff that might trigger them isn’t true. And yet, the political violence to which the public has been privy since this summer cannot be attributed to the American Right. Given their prohibitive focus on the potential for Trump supporters to once again lash out violently, it’s reasonable to conclude that this summer’s sequence of events would send political reporters into fits of catastrophism if it could be linked to the GOP. But because the gunmen, the vandals, and the assailants are of the Left, no tenuous connections are drawn or dots connected to impugn the political movement to which they are inclined.

 

Perhaps that is responsible journalism — at least insofar as it doesn’t seek to incept a panic over a series of events that have less to do with the political environment than the disordered thinking of the accused individuals. But given the media’s ceaseless vigilance for manifestations of right-wing violence to the exclusion of the menace on the left, the press doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.