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Left-wing political violence has been a major issue facing the country going back to the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Left-wing media and Democratic politicians now spend their days mainstreaming and whitewashing their extreme rhetoric while avoiding discussion of how that rhetoric is contributing to political violence.
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This was on display after the latest attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, where a gunman tried to spring past security at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The alleged manifesto of the suspect, Cole Allen, suggested that Trump and other members of his administration were his targets.
AMERICA’S LEFT-WING POLITICAL VIOLENCE PROBLEM CANNOT BE MET WITH DENIAL
That is where we can see an example of how left-wing media and politicians have attempted to whitewash the suspect’s apparent motive. Shortly after the incident, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) took to X to suggest that the shooter may have actually been targeting the liberal journalists at the dinner, posting that “A free press is foundational to our country.” Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd similarly suggested that the media was the target, blaming Trump for making people like Todd feel unsafe at public events.
The best example of this came from former President Barack Obama, who waited until after Allen’s alleged anti-Trump manifesto was reported to weigh in. With the manifesto’s anti-Trump rhetoric having been publicly reported, Obama posted on X that “we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
This is typically how it goes after an obvious case of left-wing political violence. Democrats and left-wing media try to downplay it, suggesting that we could never know what the real motive behind the violence was, searching for ways to paint it as an attack on someone or something else (such as Newsom suggesting the shooter was targeting the “free press”). The attempt to strip the left-wing motive from the violence is driven especially hard by the more progressive members of our political ecosystem, with the Nation’s Jeet Heer and “independent journalist” Ken Klippenstein both trying to paint Allen as an anti-Democrat Christian upset with Trump (which would make him right-wing “coded,” in social media-speak) rather than a progressive Democrat upset with Trump.
If this sounds familiar, it is because this is exactly what left-wing media did when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. A quick rundown from that act of left-wing violence: Matthew Dowd claimed on MSNBC that Kirk may have been shot by a supporter firing his gun in celebration (yes, he really suggested that), NPR and others tried to obfuscate the shooter’s motive by pointing to his right-wing family members, and “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that the shooter was a MAGA right-winger while shaming the MAGA Right.
Kimmel found himself in hot water for lying about that basic fact to his audience, and he was in hot water again after this latest attempt to kill Trump. That is because Kimmel performed a fake White House correspondents’ dinner monologue on his show (which is as sad as it sounds) where he made a joke about first lady Melania Trump having the “glow” of an “expectant widow.”
This attempt at a joke occurred before the attempt on Trump’s life. Kimmel claimed it was a joke about Trump’s age relative to Melania, but that was not the punch line of the joke. As we all know, the punch line of the joke was “ha ha imagine if Trump died,” a little celebration in the hypothetical death of the president because he is not of the Left. Left-wing “comedy” is all about hoping Trump dies, which is why the crowd on Saturday Night Live erupted in cheers at a joke implying Trump could be assassinated like John F. Kennedy, and why Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) pandered to his left-wing supporters by jokingly promising them that Trump would be dead soon.
The soft-pedaling of violent rhetoric and celebrations of death is most obvious in the Democratic Party’s new champion, Hasan Piker. Piker has been doing the rounds in liberal media and appearing alongside Democratic candidates. He is, in the minds of Democrats, the magic key to winning over young male voters because Piker looks like a stereotypical masculine man, even though he is nothing more than a whiny, unintelligent communist.
Democrats are mainstreaming Piker, whitewashing his pro-violence rhetoric in the process. Piker has, among other things, said that the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that people should murder Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) if they care about fraud, and that the GOP is a terrorist organization. Piker himself is a big terrorist supporter, cheerleading Hamas and any other Islamic terrorist organization he can find. The New York Times recently hosted Piker for an interview and watched him justify the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, with no pushback.
Murder is Piker’s go-to political strategy for everyone who displeases him. Here is his view of landlords, for example: “kill those motherf***ers and murder those motherf***ers in the streets … let the streets soak in their red f***ing capitalist blood.” Piker claimed he didn’t mean that seriously, but his impassioned delivery (and the fact that he regularly supports violence) says otherwise.
The rest of the Democratic Party is typically a tad more subtle than Piker, but there are plenty of implicit threats to match his overt ones. For example, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) recently told CNN that War Secretary Pete Hegseth was guilty of war crimes, and then said the following: “Back in World War II, the Allies tried Nazi submarine captains for doing this exact same thing. And guess what the conclusion was? They got executed. Listen to that, Mr. Secretary.”
Did CNN’s Erin Burnett push back on that rhetoric? Of course not. And, in fact, CNN’s Anderson Cooper then tried to sow doubt that Moulton really did say that. Cooper, in his efforts to whitewash Moulton’s rhetoric, told CNN viewers that what they had just heard on CNN’s airwaves must never have really happened. Meanwhile, also on CNN, SE Cupp declared that it is actually Trump and his administration who want their political opponents to die.
The left-wing media ecosphere isn’t just content with whitewashing political violence against Republicans, either. They also participate in whitewashing violence with political undertones. This is most obvious when it comes to illegal immigration, where these media outlets bury the lede of the violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants in deportation stories.
The latest example is the Texas Tribune, which reported on a deportation as follows: “Breaking: An Egyptian family of six believed to be the longest held at the controversial South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley were redetained Saturday after federal judges this week ordered their release. They are being sent to Egypt on a private plane, according to one of the family’s lawyers.”
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH: THE LEFT MUST CEASE CALLS FOR POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Buried in the piece is the fact that the family overstayed their tourist visa and that its patriarch firebombed Jewish protesters, killing one. The real story is that the family of an illegal immigrant terrorist is being deported, but the left-wing media narrative must focus on how the family is the real victim.
The instability in our political environment can be almost entirely attributed to how Democrats and their left-wing media allies have normalized, whitewashed, and even promoted political violence. Democrats are flirting with violence as a political strategy, and every subsequent attack (such as the one on the White House correspondents’ dinner) is a direct result of that strategy.
