There have been two mass political assassination attempts in the United States in the past decade. Both would-be assassins were MSNBC viewers. Floyd Lee Corkins attempted the mass murder of employees of the Christian group Family Research Council. James Hodgkinson attempted the mass murder of members of Congress. They were both progressives. They both imbibed the histrionics of the mouthpieces at MSNBC.
Democrats tell us words matter but seem to exempt themselves from it.
College protests of progressive students have turned violent even as Joy Reid lectures anyone who will listen to the fabulist that the protests are normal, peaceful, and democratic. She will not mention the Jewish students blocked from accessing buildings. She will not mention the antisemitic slurs.
At the University of Wisconsin, progressive protestors have started chanting, “Heil Hitler,” which the fine folks at MSNBC insist is something only rightwingers would say.
At Columbia, they chanted about a Palestine from river to sea, which is an explicitly genocidal call for the elimination of Jews and Israel. That chant has been pretty widespread.
At UCLA, pro-Hamas protestors blocked Jewish students from parts of campus.
But Joy Reid won’t discuss that. She will discuss Donald Trump as a unique and existential threat to democracy.
Nichole Wallace wants MSNBC viewers to know that if Donald Trump wins the election in November, he might take her show off the air. She could be censored by Trump. The other night, talking about the White House Correspondents Dinner, Wallace opined, “Behind the levity, though, there was something darker, a darker undercurrent, if you will, and a point that the president had to make. And it was more profoundly serious. Because at this exact time next year, depending what happens in November, seven months from now, we can’t say for certain that there would even be a White House Correspondents’ Dinner or even a free press or even a White House press corps. Right? You don’t have to have one. Could be another norm Trump blows up. The stakes of the 2024 election were a living, breathing subplot of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It came up in the jokes, came up in the inherent contrast between President Joe Biden, there in the room, and the coup-plotting, openly autocratic modeling of himself, Donald Trump, who wants to replace him.”
Joy Reid, last night, had on Robert Kagan, an editor at the terrorist propaganda outlet Washington Post, who responded to Reid’s list of a parade of horribles Donald Trump might unleash on America and claimed,
Well, he was right, I don’t know if it was the end of the interview, but the end of your quotation, when he was asked what he does think about violating the Constitution, et cetera, and calling yourself a dictator for a day. He said the people like it. I think that’s a very important point that we are not focusing enough on. This isn’t just about Donald Trump. He does have a very powerful, very mobilized constituency that is fundamentally seeking to overthrow the fundamental liberal system that the Founders created. They oppose it, they oppose it because they think that their view of the nation, they have an ethno relicious definition of the nation. For them, the nation is a white Christian, for some, a white protestant nation. This is an old strain in American history, after all. This didn’t just pop up. It’s just what’s happened now is these people have always been around, they were part of the John birch society, part of the McCarthy movement. They were in the south in the slave years, in the south during the Jim Crow years, but now for the first time, certainly in many decades, they have taken control of one of the political parties, and they have a leader who is essentially determined to destroy the system for his own purposes, but what they see is the opportunity to change the system in a way that is more to their liking and therefore not consistent with what the Founders intended.
The network regularly has Michael Beschloss claiming Trump, if re-elected, would become a dictator and refuse to give up power, so Trump must be stopped. They have amplified Hillary Clinton’s claims that Trump will target, arrest, and maybe even kill his opponents. They are now openly claiming Donald Trump intends to “overthrow the fundamental liberal system that the Founders created.”
Two men were inspired by the depraved hysterics of the women at MSNBC to attempt the mass assassination of conservatives.
If the people at Fox News regularly engaged in this discourse, both Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy would cover it nonstop and denounce Fox News’s subtle calls for the assassination of whichever Democrats they went on about.
Donald Trump does not have the unique ability to drive people to violence. MSNBC hosts have already driven two men to attempt mass assassination. Now, their extremist rhetoric at a time progressive activists have already turned violent, is just increasing the temperature.
Before attempting to kill Republican congressmen, James Hodgkinson wrote what sounds like MSNBC talking points on social media. He wrote, “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” Hodgkinson noted that MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow was “one of my favorite TV shows.”
According to the Secret Sevice, Hodgkinson, “[o]penly shared his anti-Republican views with friends, family, and others; attended protests; wrote letters to his local paper expressing discontent with economic inequality and taxes; never made a threat.”
From 2008 to 2012, Hodgkinson also wrote at least 27 letters to his local newspaper, the Belleville News-Democrat, most of which discussed his desire to increase the number of tax brackets. Other letters discussed the economy and economic inequality. Two of his letters promoted legalizing marijuana so that it could be a source of tax revenue for the government. One letter from 2011 expressed admiration for protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement and complained about “our do-nothing Congress doing nothing while our country is going down the tubes.” That same year, he was at an Occupy Wall Street protest near his hometown and told a television news reporter that “the 99% are getting pushed around and the 1% are just not giving a damn.” The local newspaper reported at the time that Hodgkinson was part of a group of the “99 percent” who hoped to bring awareness to the political and financial power he believed were controlled by the top 1 percent of wage earners in the United States.
Sounds like some of the current protestors.
Comcast has chosen to offer its viewers subtle assassination fan fiction. The network that has insisted words matter and that people can be driven to violence through others’ words is increasingly dialing up the hysteria as Trump’s poll numbers go up. They would never admit it, but we can acknowledge the network really hopes Trump eats a bullet.
They can deny it. But a network that parades daily the terribles of a future Trump Administration and how he must be stopped because he is a unique existential threat will have to forgive us if we do not believe them.
Words carry weight. Words uttered at MSNBC inspired the attempted mass assassination of Republican members of Congress. Knowing they have that power, you’d think they would be more responsible unless that’s what they want.
