The Right's Rising Tide of Violent Rhetoric Is Deadly
By Eric Boehlert
Media Matters for America: January 11, 2011
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords appears be the latest victim of anti-government
violence that has taken hold in America since 2009. It's a wave of violence
that's cresting along with a tide of hateful, insurrectionist rhetoric that
far too many conservatives refuse to condemn. Instead, the toxic talk is
routinely defended as being nothing more than spirited debate.
It's not. It's deadly. And until those in positions of power say so, the
dangerous rhetoric is likely to continue.
Whether that rhetoric played a role in the gun massacre that erupted at the
Tucson shopping center on Saturday, we don't yet know. Note that over the
weekend the local Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, condemned "the vitriolic
rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business
and some people in the TV business," and especially the influence it may
have on "unbalanced" people, like the Tucson shooter.
What's undeniable is that the attempted assassination of Giffords took place
against a right-wing media backdrop that has been targeting the government,
and specifically Democrats, in an unconscionable manner:
* "The suicide-bomber-in-chief, Barack Obama"
* Beck suggests Obama admin might kill "10 percent" of population
* Quinn: "Yes," Obama is "trying to destroy the country"
As facts of the Giffords shooting continue to come in, let's understand what
has transpired in recent months as right-wing partisans have rushed past any
sense of common decency and responsibility to endless attack and condemn
Democrats. For instance, let's recall that last March when Congress was
preparing to vote on passing health care reform, partisans in the far-right
press denounced the vote in apocalyptic language as they depicted Democrats
as monsters who deserved to be physically tortured.
Recall that at the same time, a surge of political violence erupted across
the county as Democrats became the target of what were essentially terrorist
attacks.
a.. Rep. Tom Perriello's (D-VA) brother's address was erroneously posted
online by a Tea Party blogger who invited activists to descend on the house.
A gas line outside the brother's house was cut.
b.. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) was the target of threatening faxes and phone
calls, including death threats.
c.. A brick was thrown through the window of the Democratic Party office
in Rochester, New York.
d.. Rep. Anthony Weiner's office in Kew Gardens, New York, had to be
evacuated after suspicious white powder was found in an envelope mailed to
the office.
e.. A thrown brick smashed a window at Rep. Louise Slaughter's district
office in Niagara Falls, New York.
f.. Slaughter also received a message claiming that "snipers were being
deployed to kill those members who voted yes for health care," according to
Politico.
g.. The FBI arrested a California man for making threatening phone calls
to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
h.. A tossed brick demolished a window at the Sedgwick County Democratic
Party headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.
i.. A devoted Glenn Beck fan left a serious of death threats ("Kill the
fucking Senator! ") on the voice mail at the office of Sen. Patty Murray
And of course, there was the attack on Gifford's Tucson office last March.
Hours after voting in favor of health care reform, vandals smashed the front
door, along with a headquarters window. Days later, Gifford spoke about
being targeted.
"Our office corner has become a place where the Tea Party has congregated.
And the rhetoric has become incredibly heated. Not just the calls, but the
emails, the slurs," she told MSNBC. "We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list,
but the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our
district. And when people do that, they've gotta realize there's
consequences to that action."
Perhaps most telling at the time was the fact that veteran members of
Congress told Giffords that they'd never seen the kind of angry,
anti-government madness that was unleashed surrounding the health care vote.
But rather than unequivocally condemn, or even rationally discuss how the
violent rhetoric had become increasingly indefensible, and rather than
encouraging partisan activists to dial it down before somebody got hurt,
conservative pundits urged followers to forge ahead with their calls to
arms, even blaming Democrats for bringing the deadly threats and acts of
violence upon themselves by voting in favor of health care reform.
Indeed, after bricks were being thrown through offices windows and audible
death threats left on answer machines, the conservative media mocked the
idea that Democrats were being targeted and suggested the well-documented
incidents had been somehow manufactured. Last March, Glenn Beck complained,
"It's almost as if the left is trumping all of this up just for the
politics."
Rush Limbaugh agreed: "Our side doesn't do this kind of stuff. It's all made
up -- 95 percent of it's made up and it's being done to divert everybody's
attention."
And from Andrew Breitbart's site, Big Government: "We doubt these threats
are actually real and, certainly wouldn't condone them."
Chilling.
For those who didn't get the point, Fox News' Stephen Hayes shrugged off the
acts of violence and threats, suggesting, "This happens all the time," while
his Fox News colleague Charles Krauthammer said, "I'm sure a lot of this is
trumped up."
Or as the Daily Caller's S.E. Cupp put it on Fox News at the time,
"Democrats who did this, who sort of rammed this down our throats regardless
of the fact that it actually won't save us any money -- it's is going to
bankrupt us and that the American people didn't want it -- want us to feel
sorry for them that they've gotten a couple of angry, you know, voice mails.
They should read my e-mail. You know, what did they expect? No one condones
threats. No one condones the violence, but I'm glad people are angry. I hope
they stay angry."
Even after Byron Williams, in a jailhouse interview, told reporter John
Hamilton that he was heavily influenced by Glenn Beck's conspiratorial rants
at the time when Williams plotted to assassinate leaders at the Tides
Foundation and the ACLU, what did Sarah Palin do? What did Fox News' Palin
do in response to a direct request that she act as a true leader and call
for a cooling off of the increasingly deadly rhetoric that had become a
cornerstone of the conservative movement? Palin reaffirmed her support of
the talker's incendiary fear mongering: "I stand with you, Glenn."
Whatever the reason for Saturday's semi-automatic killing spree in Tucson,
what's inescapable is that the government and government officials have been
elevated to prime targets of physical attack in the last two years. We've
certainly never seen them targeted so casually within segments of the
popular media. The spike in attacks, both the actual attacks and threatened
ones, comes amidst a spike in explicit, insurrectionist rhetoric that
singles out the government as being a source of intentional evil within
America.
There's a political and media movement in this country that's eagerly
painting a bull's-eyes on the back of the U.S. government and its
representatives. Not surprisingly, more and more marksmen are taking aim.
Eric Boehlert is is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He's the
author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Free Press, 2006) and
Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press (Free
Press, 2009). He worked for five years as a senior writer for Salon.com,
where he wrote extensively about media and politics.
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