This week Donald Trump began to sound like the hard-left censors he and his supporters revile. We all know the type. The professors, advocates, and politicians who rail on about “stochastic terrorism”; the idea that heated rhetoric in the public space can inspire the mentally imbalanced to commit violence.
Understandably angry about the second attempt on his life in two months, the former president is now explicitly blaming the actions of his would-be assassins on the rhetoric of his political opposition.
“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate. . . has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” Trump tweeted this week. “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, struck a similar chord. On Monday he tweeted: “Here is what we know so far: Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump. The gunman agreed, and used the exact same phrase.”
Now there is a fair point to be made about the left’s hypocrisy. After all, the Democrats are the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2022 said that a Tucker Carlson segment about her on his old Fox show was responsible for a spike in death threats she received. It was “stochastic terrorism,” she told the hosts of the popular radio program, The Breakfast Club. If it’s okay to suggest that a news segment about AOC is responsible for death threats against her, isn’t it just as legitimate to say that those who label Trump a threat to democracy are responsible for the two assassination attempts against him?
It’s also undeniable that the Democratic Party’s demonization of Donald Trump has led many within its ranks to violate basic political norms because they have been convinced that he must be stopped at any cost. Why else would states like Colorado and Maine try to remove Trump’s name from presidential ballots during the Republican primary? And why would a Manhattan district attorney put Trump through the spectacle of a trial because the former president tried to buy the silence of a porn star?
The problem, though, is that Trump and his supporters are falling into the same trap as the left by abandoning the classically liberal principle of distinguishing rhetoric from violence. When Trump says that his opponents’ words are the reason “the bullets are flying,” he is putting forth a version of the same argument his opposition has advanced since he was first elected to the White House.
Just think of the first presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, in 2019. She promised back then that she would use the power of the presidency to pressure Twitter to remove the sitting president’s account. In a letter she made public to Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, Harris wrote that Trump had made blatant threats against his political opponents. “We need a civil society, not a civil war,” she wrote. (Yes, civil war.)
Once the line between speech and violence is erased, the marketplace of ideas is in peril. In 2020, trans rights activists waged a nasty campaign to pressure retailers not to sell Abigail Shrier’s groundbreaking book, Irreversible Damage—the first to report on the spike in cases of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls. Target eventually caved to the demands of this digital mob.
The dubious argument was that Shrier’s book would inflame hatred and violence against trans people and cause them to commit self-harm. A staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which once vigorously defended unpopular speech, even joined in the campaign. Fortunately, Amazon and other retailers did not cave to the pressure.
One reason they didn’t was that the calls to ban speech on the grounds that it might inspire violence was only coming from one side of the political spectrum. Amazon still had to worry about the millions of Americans who still believed the best antidote to bad speech was better speech.
In the last eight years, conservatives have led the pushback against social media companies that colluded with the federal government to ban speech on their platforms. The right blew the whistle on activists for pressuring companies to demonetize YouTube accounts that did not adhere to their orthodoxies. So it’s tragic that Trump and his supporters would compromise their free speech principles to score a few points in a news cycle.
Trump’s failed assassins are responsible for their own actions. They were not programmed by the overheated rhetoric of MSNBC or the Biden White House or the Harris campaign. To blame their speech for the near calamities of the last two months is to imperil a principle that has made America great since its founding.
Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his most recent piece “Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers.”
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Use common sense here: disagree, debate, but don't be a .