Threaded throughout news coverage of the twin massacres of this past weekend have been references to how the shootings have left Americans feeling “despair and helplessness,” as well as “bewildered” and “numb” in the face of such violence. These are certainly some of the emotions being felt, but it is notable that foregrounding such passive feelings seriously downplays reactions like anger and hatred toward the killers that are also surely coursing through the body politic. It is also critical for us to realize that the idea of a whole country traumatized and defenseless is very much a part of the cycle perpetuating mass killings generally, whether politically motivated or otherwise. And in the case of the subset of specifically white nationalist perpetrators, such a public reaction, or the media’s characterization of it as such, validates the use of terrorism as a way of destabilizing our liberal, multi-racial democracy that they ultimately seek to destroy. When reporting overemphasizes the impact violence has had on our society, when it suggests that Americans have been reduced to an infantile or depressive state, it is an unintended boon to the killers.
In the wake of mass shootings generally, my sense is that this journalistic overemphasis on feelings of national trauma, and underemphasis on the many millions of people for whom each killing feeds a sense of righteous fury and determination to end the violence, is tightly connected with the news media’s inclination to characterize the government’s failure to act meaningfully on gun violence as a bipartisan issue. But the truth is that it is the Republican Party that, as a matter of ideology and keeping open major spigots of campaign funding, has been dead set against any meaningful gun control measures for a generation and more. And while the Democratic Party has much to answer for in having deprioritized such measures for far too long, at this point there’s no ambiguity as to which party is backing gun control and which still opposes it tooth and nail.
Once reporting on gun violence begins taking note not simply of people’s “helplessness,” but of their anger, then there is a logical need to start talking about the targets of the anger, and what the anger has motivated them to do (as opposed to reporting on “helplessness,” which by definition does not move into political action). And any discussion of anger will at a minimum open a discussion of the blame rightly directed at the GOP for not only standing in the way of even the most minimal gun legislation, but also working in the opposite direction, to help expand the cult of gun ownership and, inevitably, gun violence. Overly dedicated to providing “balance” in news coverage, the media has deep incentives to play up and even conjure out of whole cloth an idea of American helplessness, as a way of avoiding the unpalatable truth that where guns are concerned, one side of the political aisle is deeply in the wrong.
As damaging as this insistence on a nation benumbed and immobilized is when reporting on gun violence and mass shootings generally, this tendency becomes absolutely toxic when it’s applied to white nationalist terrorist shootings. Indeed, the intersection of Donald Trump’s white nationalist mindset and political agenda with an acceleration of white supremacist violence across the country presents an enormous challenge to a news media dedicated to a “both sides do it” form of political journalism. “Enormous challenge” actually understates things; I’d say that this president has essentially blown up the media’s ability to credibly maintain this unhelpful balancing act, certainly on gun issues and white supremacy. As many have been and are beginning to argue — including leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination — the president is attacking immigrants and minorities with the same language as white nationalist terrorists. He is inciting violence against these groups, violence that is in fact occurring. Whether or not individual acts can be tied to direct motivation by Donald Trump is beside the point; he is now the single greatest contributor to an ideology of hatred and dehumanization for which violence is the inevitable conclusion. And to remove any doubt that such white nationalism is central to his politics, the Trump 2020 campaign has made it clear that it will be centered on fomenting hatred of immigrants and minorities.
Despite these plain facts — in fact, because of them — leading news organizations and opinion writers are out with editorials this week calling on the president to moderate his language, to repudiate white nationalists, to show moral leadership. Such calls are nonsensical. Even if we offer up the most immense benefit of the doubt, and concede that Trump’s words and actions may not have already incited particular acts of violence, and merely acknowledge that they clearly might, then there is no point in calling on him to change his ways; this incitement alone makes him unfit to be president. More insidiously, they suggest that the president can be part of the solution to this crisis, when in fact he is a primary cause.
Beyond this, such “calls upon the president” that suggest Donald Trump might change his rhetoric skip over an even more damning fact: that not just the president’s language, but his very actions and stated legislative goals, implement a white supremacist worldview. From his lie that millions of undocumented immigrants cast votes for Hillary Clinton, necessitating draconian voting restrictions that would disproportionately affect minority voters, to the horrors inflicted on immigrants crossing the southern border, to his pushing for changes to the census that would undercount minorities, the president has indicated that if you’re not white, you’re not a full citizen, and really not fully human, to boot.
Having made the argument since day one of this presidency that Donald Trump deserves to be removed from office at the earliest opportunity, I feel in a better position than most to observe that our greatest political problem — apart from an aspiring authoritarian president and a Republican Party comfortable with disassembling American democracy in favor of a plutocratic, apartheid-lite state — is that we are collectively having difficulty comprehending the larger picture of what is happening: namely, the general assault on American democracy by the president and the Republican Party. This is why it’s so important to be aware of the biases and logical fallacies in reporting on this presidency that distort our collective ability to fashion an effective and appropriate response to what it is not an overstatement to call a crisis of American democracy.
For many reasons, coverage of gun violence brings multiple dysfunctional threads of our national story together. The shock of escalating white nationalist terrorism has been dangerously obscured by how it appears as simply one small portion of the larger crisis of gun violence, allowing the threat to grow without the public taking adequate notice; yet because this terrorism largely involves gun violence, media coverage has tended to lump it into the same “issue without a solution” category. A sharper look at the accelerants to gun violence generally, such as the GOP’s lockstep opposition to the most basic regulations, leads inexorably to the connections between the GOP’s ability to defy the will of the majority via gerrymandering and voter suppression, and our inability to pass laws that have huge majority support, such as background checks. Such an understanding leads in turn to the fact that the GOP has ensured that a growing terrorist threat is well-armed and well-versed in an established, politically-enabled culture of mass shootings.
In the case of the white nationalist agenda propagated by the White House, it’s supremely dangerous to excuse the inexcusable, or to believe that the president will change his ways. If we could somehow separate out the violence that this presidency is enabling, such an agenda would still be unacceptable. It’s un-American to say you’re not a fully citizen if you’re black, or were born in another country. It’s un-American to put kids in cages, and to house immigrants in unhealthy and demeaning conditions. It’s un-American to encourage your supporters to revile opposition politicians because of the color of their skin or country of origin. It’s un-American to give comfort and support to the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet, as bad as these outcomes are, the deadliest point can’t be stressed enough: violence is the logical outcome when the highest power in the land employs rhetoric and enacts policies indistinguishable from the wish list of avowed white nationalists. And the propagation of violence by the White House is unforgivable. There is no bargaining with such a power, there is no finding a middle ground or compromise. Violence is the death of democracy, and our single greatest aim must be to ensure that the violence embraced and unleashed upon our country delegitimizes this president’s ability to continue in office. Such a president, and the party that supports him, must not only be defeated, but utterly discredited. America needs a real conservative party; it doesn’t need, or deserve, a white supremacist one.
Among other things, what this all should make clear is that the media is not going to save us from this president and this political crisis. No matter where the facts seem to lead, there is apparently an overwhelming bias, at least for the time being, against making the connections that are staring us in the face. In fact, we can see how the worse the president and the GOP get, the more powerful certain tendencies in the media will be to pretend that it isn’t so; to choose cognitive dissonance (like the Twitter-notorious Trump Urges Unity Versus Racism headline from The New York Times a day or two ago) over accurate framing and contextualization that would place major media institutions squarely on one side of our great political rupture. There is no way forward other than to fully acknowledge the depths of our danger, and to organize and mobilize the greatest movement for democracy and justice this country has ever seen.