The sanctimonious calls for unity are a little hard to take.
I n the days following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, members of the Democratic Party and the press have complained that the right is not doing more to promote unity.
Unity would be nice, sure. You first.
“At moments like this, when tensions are high, then part of the job of the president is to pull people together,” former President Barack Obama told an audience last week.
“Whether we’re Democrats, Republicans, independents, we have to recognize that on both sides, undoubtedly, there are people who are extremists and who say things that are contrary to what I believe are America’s core values,” he said. “But I will say that those extreme views were not in my White House. I wasn’t embracing them. I wasn’t empowering them. I wasn’t putting the weight of the United States government behind extremist views. And that . . . when we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem.”
Obama then said, “My view was that part of the role of the presidency is to constantly remind us of the ties that bind us together.”
That he may sincerely believe those words would be laughable were it not the modus operandi of the Democratic Party and its media allies to invent alternate realities in which their people are forever the heroic and faultless champions of lofty ideals.
The Obama White House, alas, did not represent bipartisan comity. His administration was hardly respectful toward all viewpoints or mindful of constitutional rights. The Obama White House used the Espionage Act against U.S. reporters who refused to give up their sources, it secretly obtained phone records from the Associated Press, it oversaw a weaponized IRS that targeted conservative groups, and it turned the entire intelligence apparatus against the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.
We’re talking here about President “I want you to argue with them and get in their face” Obama, who, at a memorial service in 2016 for five murdered police officers, chose to scold law enforcement, saying, “With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals.” (Give the man credit: At least he managed something less glib than “acted stupidly.”)
How does one achieve unity with a man who lives in a fantasy land, where his opponents are the only ones responsible for political division? This goes well beyond just one man’s delusions and high self-regard; it’s a party-wide problem.
An especially loathsome example involves the tragic killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, State Senator John Hoffman. Many on the left insist they were the victims of right-wing political extremism — except that the man who allegedly murdered the couple appears to be an insane person, not an ideologically motivated assassin.
Yet the myth persists anyway in Democratic and media circles that Vance Boelter was a right-wing hit man, and that the Minnesota murders are a comparable rejoinder to the right’s anger over the targeted slaying of the Turning Point USA founder.
In response to Senator Ted Cruz saying Boelter “was not a right-wing assassin” but was instead a “deranged lunatic,” Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias asserted, “Very prominent conservative people — sitting United States Senators, not anons on social media — keep lying about the assassination of a Democratic Party elected official, the murder of her husband, and the shooting of another elected official.”
He added, “I get that [Charlie Kirk] was dramatically more famous than any state legislator (and the majority of members of congress) in America, but assassinating politicians is actually a very big deal and the inability of leading voices on the right to get basic facts straight is troubling.”
It’s the absolute certainty with which they assert versions of reality that don’t exist, from “men can get pregnant” (they can’t) to “crime in the nation’s capital was under control before Trump stepped in” (it wasn’t) to “there wasn’t a crisis at the border during the Biden presidency” (there was), that is so disturbing.
Voting records indicate that Boelter once supported Republicans, including President Trump, but by 2019, he was officially listed as having no party affiliation. When he was apprehended, the alleged gunman had a hit list featuring Democratic lawmakers. He was also found with anti-Trump rally paraphernalia. More importantly, Boelter wrote letters claiming that Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had ordered him to assassinate state and federal lawmakers, and that he had been secretly “trained by U.S. Military people off the books starting in college.”
In other words, the right is as responsible for the Minnesota murders as Jimmy Carter is for Son of Sam, which is to say not at all.
Yet, here we are, being lectured about the dangers of right-wing extremism and rhetoric. This isn’t even the worst of it. The worst is that Democrats are clearly using those murders to avoid engaging in uncomfortable conversations about Kirk’s assassination. Even Obama used Minnesota to draw fire away from last week’s assassination.
“Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy,” Obama said. “What happened . . . to the state legislators in Minnesota, that is horrific.”
Curiously, Obama hadn’t said anything publicly about the Minnesota slayings until it became necessary to “both sides” the targeted killing of Kirk. Not even on Twitter/X, where he has memorialized the passings of Robert Redford and Chicago Cubs star Ryne Sandberg, had Obama mentioned what happened in Minnesota. It was only last week, after Kirk was murdered, that the former president felt compelled to acknowledge Hortman and Hoffman.
Even in the Kirk case, some on the left have deluded themselves into believing that the assassin, who appears to have been left-wing and was living with his gender-transitioning boyfriend at the time of the killing, is actually a right-wing MAGA type and that the assassination was a “white supremacist gang hit.”
How is unity possible? How does one unite with a group whose media patrons will, despite readily available evidence, contradict and deny the facts staring them right in the face, as NBC News’ ironically titled “disinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny did last week when she claimed that the idea that left-wingers are celebrating Kirk’s murder is “the total opposite of what’s actually happening”?
How does one unite with a group whose base includes people who celebrate murder and whose ideological allies will simply write it off as people having bad opinions, as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait did last week?
“In the absence of evidence of any serious strain of liberal support for the Charlie Kirk murder,” said Chait, “some influential voices on the right willed one into existence. They hunted the internet for expressions of support for Kirk’s murder, or even insufficient remorse, a search that yielded almost exclusively random private citizens.”
No one had to “hunt.” The celebratory notices and dances performed by people using their real names and faces, many of whom are everyday professionals (such as teachers, veterinarians, and nurses), have practically flooded social media.
Unity? With this?
Not everyone on the left has been so vile; a number of voices were properly appalled by the killing and have sought to turn the temperature down. But the left has a wing of fanatical foot soldiers who evidently enjoy it when people on the right are killed, and no one in leadership or positions of influence appears willing to acknowledge it, let alone rein it in. Ask anyone on the left, from the most vanilla lawmaker to a Pol Pot–lite podcaster, about left-wing violence, and you’ll get one of five responses (or some combination):
- What violence?
- The violence is actually right-wing.
- White supremacy is worse.
- It wasn’t violence; it was justice.
- Now is the time for unity.
How does one seek unity with a group that cannot acknowledge the faults and dangers on its own side?
Unity would be nice, sure. You first.