The term “waving the bloody shirt’’ has its origin in the tense, post-Civil War Reconstruction era, used to denounce the fiery rhetoric of those citing the gore of battles won to wreak vengeance upon those who supported the ruined and defeated Confederacy.
It’s a phrase that still carries weight in contemporary society, defining perfectly the reaction of President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump and his fellow right-wing travelers to the senseless and horrible assassination last week of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, gunned down on a Utah college campus during a presentation of his conservative views.
Trump can hardly be blamed for reacting emotionally to Kirk’s horrific death. The two men were said to be close. But, as is his wont, Trump has gone miles beyond waving the bloody shirt to avenge Kirk’s death, seemingly hoisting it instead on the famously tall flagpole at his Mar-a-Lago resort and letting it flap wildly in a Florida hurricane wind.
Rather than urge the nation’s disparate political factions to ease tensions and promote the ideal of civil discourse rather than resort to violent displays, Trump focused on retribution targeting anyone a millimeter to the left of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, blaming the entire liberal establishment for Kirk’s sad demise and siccing his Justice Department on those who don’t share the grief over his passing.
In Trump’s cockeyed world, political violence is found exclusively within the left-wing camp.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,’’ Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support…’’
Rather than blame the solitary gunman for the killing and urging a tempered response, Trump is following the dictate famously voiced by Rahm Emanuel during his time as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Trump is using the crisis surrounding Kirk’s terrible and unfortunate death to destroy his political opposition and expand his already bloated powers, essentially maintaining that anyone who ever called Kirk a fascist or a Nazi is fueling hatred and driving some individuals to acts of political violence. And there are plenty of folks following in lockstep to his assessment.
Individuals in various spots around the country have been fired from their jobs or expelled from school for expressing pleasure in Kirk’s death, owing, no doubt, to his conservative viewpoint. Jimmy Kimmel’s late night television show has been placed on indefinite hiatus after one of Trump’s henchmen, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, hinted that ABC should suspend or fire Kimmel for remarks he made about Kirk, menacingly stating, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,”
In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union said, “Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”
It bears noting that no other president in American history has used more inflammatory language in attacking his opponents than Donald J. Trump. He has accused one of his predecessors – President Barak Obama – of treason, noting that the penalty for that transgression is death. He has accused another predecessor, President Joe Biden, of utilizing “Gestapo’’ tactics. Referring to Hillary Clinton, who he defeated in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said, “For what she’s done, they should lock her up.” He said she should go to jail on several occasions.
Yet, in Trump’s mind, it’s the vituperation of the left-wing, and the left-wing alone, creating violence.
It is clear, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, that political violence is a nonpartisan issue. If anything, it is slightly more acute on the right side than the left. A study by a federal agency, the National Institute of Justice, titled “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism,’’ published last year, concluded that, “Militant, nationalistic, violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study stated. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
That report, by the way, was deleted this week from the Department of Justice website.
What a surprise.
And if you don’t like the NIJ analysis there’s a study from the Cato Institute, a libertarian outfit that leans more right than left, that concluded Islamic terrorists are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975. But “right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total.’’
The report stated, “Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.’’
Those are just examples. It would be simple to say that, on this issue, Trump has lost the moral high ground, except for the fact that he has never possessed the moral high ground. Several leagues below Death Valley summarizes Trump’s moral high ground status.
Can anyone take this seriously coming from him?
Trump is right when he asserts that political violence is a growing problem, citing Kirk and the two assassination attempts on his own life. But his solution parroting Louis Renault – “Round up the usual suspects’’ – is worthless since, in his mind, the only suspects are liberals.
Kirk is another question. Republicans and conservatives in general are talking about him as if he were the second coming of Mohandas K. Gandhi. One congressman, and no, I’m not making this up, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-TX, who must be a real lulu, said, “Charlie Kirk would have been the thirteenth Disciple’’ had he lived during Biblical times.
Now, I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. For all I know he could have been a prince of a fellow. Although many of his public comments — he called Biden a “corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America,’’ sought the release of the man who assaulted the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, that resulted in severe injuries, said, “The attempted Islamic takeover of America is made possible thanks to mass migration,” etc. — paint a distinctly different picture.
Regardless, here, I must make a confession — I was initially perplexed by the widespread hair-on-fire reaction to Kirk’s untimely and violent death. The reaction is reaching JFK assassination proportions.
Kirk was, essentially, a political operative. Through my work I have literally known dozens of political operatives, good and bad, over the past 50 years and I can’t think of anyone, with the possible exception of James Carville, whose death, violent or otherwise, would have gathered this much notice.
That is a failure of perception wholly on my part for failing to truly appreciate the way folks receive information these days through the internet. Everybody with a hammer hits a nail and calls themselves a carpenter. People search out information that conforms to their views and heroes emerge. Kirk, apparently was one of those heroes.
That same internet played a role in less than flattering descriptions of Kirk himself, hyperbolic and downright nasty judgments that included claims of Nazism. Kirk may not have been the thirteenth disciple but he certainly wasn’t Joseph Goebels either.
And while Trump is using Kirk’s death to fuel a power play and clear the field of his detractors, providing him with an opportunity for a true authoritarian regime, some are simply displaying decency.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville, is one of them. In a statement that ran in the Northern Kentucky Tribune and elsewhere, McConnell, calling himself an “elder statesman,’’ rued the death of Kirk but stood up for sharp debate.
“In fact, our Constitution anticipated and encouraged lively debate,’’ McConnell wrote. “Our system of government was built for it. Passionate disagreement is a sign of the health of our democracy. And guardrails exist to protect it.’’
Regardless of what he described as the shooter’s “deluded justification,’’ McConnell said “there is nothing less American than to override the guardrails of public discourse.’’
Violence is not the answer. Healthy debate is.
“Every one of us must resist the temptation to treat those with different politics as enemies,’’ McConnell said. “We must treat the clash of ideas in the public square as a celebration of our democracy, not a pretext for war. If you’re ever tempted to believe in recourse to violence among neighbors, patriots and fellow citizens, think again. Think of Charlie. And keep his family in your prayers.’’
Well put.