Four days out from an attempted kidnapping and attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that turned into an assault on her husband, we continue to see the dysfunctions of the Democrats, the malevolence of the GOP, and the shortcomings of the media interact around this story in toxic fashion. Even as prosecutors have quickly brought charges against assailant David DePape, right-wing media have promulgated insane conspiracy theories and other falsehoods around the attack. For instance, The New York Times reports that “Charlie Kirk, the conservative radio and YouTube host, expressed hope on Monday that some “amazing patriot” would post bail for Mr. DePape and become a “midterm hero.” Figures like Donald Trump, Jr. and Elon Musk have promoted a theory that Pelosi was actually assaulted by a gay prostitute he had hired, while Fox News has tried to make the attack seem full of murky questions and suggested it was just another crime in crime-ridden San Francisco.
Meanwhile, GOP politicians have stood by and tacitly endorsed the lack of accountability for right-wing media’s role in the attack, let alone the party’s own participation in years and years of inciting language directed against the House Speaker. And the Democrats appear eager to put the story behind them, once again deciding against confrontation of a Republican Party that has clearly placed incitement of violence at the center of its political strategy. By ignoring the political dynamite of a right-wing freak coming close to kidnapping or killing Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have ensured there’s space for conspiracy theories to thrive; where there should be a summoning of mass public and outrage and a blizzard of rhetorical attack against the right’s inculcation of violence, we instead see a right-wing emboldened to double down on hateful and destabilizing rhetoric.
Columnist Will Bunch has written a thorough-going critique of the fourth estate’s coverage failure around this attack, making a case for the media’s complicity in the right’s ongoing assault on democracy. He writes:
The problems with shrugging off the political implications of growing, violent extremism are two-fold. A muddled voice from America’s leading newsrooms won’t help in quashing the inevitable right-wing conspiracy theories about what happened in San Francisco which — you will not be shocked to learn — spread within hours of the news. But the muted response also gave wide license for TV pundits to “both sides” this assassination attempt when almost all of the political violence in America, as well as the threats to our election, are coming from one side, which is the far-right movement driving the Republican Party.
Crucially, Bunch fits the coverage of the Pelosi attack within the context of a larger media failure to provide accurate coverage of the 2022 midterms, “from the rise of unabashed Christian nationalism to the number of Republicans running for key offices who believe (based on zero evidence) that President Biden was not legitimately elected to the threats to the election like the armed men patrolling an Arizona voting location.”
I have to admit that the basic unwillingness of the Democrats to confront, and of the media to accurately report, the right-wing threats and violence across the nation has begun to take on a nightmarish quality — of something outlandish and logic-defying transpiring in the real world without any sign that there will be a self-correction. Press coverage that continues to insist that we are in a situation where the main takeaway is that violence is being incited by both political parties and both sides of the political spectrum is simply dishonest. It is like reporting on World War II and saying that the most salient fact is that invasions have increased worldwide.
And even accounting for crazies on the left who threaten and commit violence, such a “both sides” description is night and day from the fact that the GOP, as one of America’s two major political parties, clearly now sees incitement and violence as key strategies for gaining and maintaining power. THIS is the heart of the difference between the two, which not incidentally divides them into the categories of an authoritarian versus a democratic political party. In contrast, the Democrats, if nothing else, have been unwavering on insisting that violence and violent rhetoric have no place in a free and democratic society. Any false equivalence between the parties serves the interests of the Republicans, full stop.
It’s worth continuing to ask why the Democrats, in particular, simply seem unable or unwilling to meet this crisis. I have to assume that part of the reason is that they think it will somehow blow over — that, to use familiar phrasing, the right-wing fever will break. But this disregards the alternate possibility that we are seeing play out in real time — that there are no apparent limits to the depravity and bloodlust of the GOP and the authoritarian movement behind it, and that every step forward that they are permitted only emboldens them further. You need look no further than this incident yesterday in Arizona, where gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake managed to crack up her audience with laughter by telling them, “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection." Expecting ordinary people to at some point reach their limits with violent rhetoric and violence itself sets aside the reality that such speech and events are conditioning Americans on the right to accept more of it, not less. Such expectations also set aside the reality that this is a conscious right-wing political strategy based on activating and encouraging the worst, but very real, aspects of human nature: our capacity for cruelty, for revenge, for violence. The Democrats continue to apply an overly rational, and frankly overly optimistic, view of politics and human nature to a political reality that is quickly turning into a case study in how a fascist movement can spread when the political opposition refuses to identify it for what it is, or to treat it with the appropriate contempt, condemnation, and above all, righteous pushback.