Commentary by K.E. Bell
The inflammatory rhetoric should indeed be turned down, and it has to start at the top.
That won’t happen.
Trump knows only one play: Attack, attack, attack. He regularly refers to Democrats as the radical left. There is no radical left, at least not one that has a sniff of power.
Today’s Democratic leaders are centrists at best or even center right based on both history and accepted norms across the world.
Trump suggests violence in his rhetoric (“Just knock the hell [out of ‘em], I will pay for the legal fees, I promise”), his actions (pardoning the January 6thers), and his unrelenting barrage of Truth Social posts (see: Chipocalypse Now: “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”) He is a 79-year-old with the mindset of a sixth-grade playground bully. He’s far beyond learning from his mistakes at this point.
Perhaps this growth in political violence was inevitable. It seems to me it’s the natural result of 30 years of Fox News propaganda and demonization of the left, and it’s only getting worse. Brian Kilmeade wasn’t cancelled for saying the homeless should be killed, but Jimmy Kimmel was put on suspension for pointing out what Trump said when asked how he is doing with the death of his friend, Charlie Kirk. Trump’s response? Look at the construction underway for the White House ballroom. I don’t know if a more sociopathic response was possible.
Fox News is an echo chamber that traps its viewers into a distorted point of view.
According to a 2012 Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind survey, Fox News viewers know less about what’s going on in the world than people who watch no news at all, but they are quite certain the left is to blame for everything. Do we think Fox has become more informative in the age of Trump? Heck no. Will Fox News change? It’s not in the company’s best financial interest, so no.
And now we can build echo chambers of our own through social media platforms with algorithms designed to incite outrage. That leads to more and more radical influencers who make the public discourse more and more radical — people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, both of whom have or have had Trump’s ear.
Fuentes’ to-the-right-of Turning Point Groyper movement placed him at odds with Kirk, fueling some speculation about suspect Tyler Robinson’s politics.
Violence is never the right answer to political disagreements. But let’s not pretend the rhetoric is as bad on the left as it is on the right. “Both sides” arguments are appropriate when there is a balance between parties. There is no such balance today.
The extremism on the right starts at the top, gets reinforced by the number one media outlet in the country, and metastasizes in our own curated social media feeds.
Does it need to stop? Absolutely. Will it? I don’t see how.
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Bell is a contributing pundit for The Hustings.
On Rich Corbett's right-column call for responsible political discourse -- Mr. Corbett is absolutely correct that Mr. Kirk's murder demonstrates the deep need for reform and improvement in political discourse. I do not have robust hope that it will in fact serve as the catalyst for such improvement; however, I am grateful that Mr. Corbett expressed his views as he did. --Hugh Hansen
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