Ryan Wesley Routh “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Donald Trump said in a Fox News interview after Routh was caught apparently lying in wait for, and with ill intentions toward, the former president.  “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at …”

Well, no, for two reasons.

The less important reason is that neither Biden nor Harris have ever publicly incited the murder of opposing domestic political candidates and have, in fact, inveighed against Trump’s would-be assassins.

Even if you don’t believe Biden and Harris possess strong moral fiber, that still makes sense. Our masters find the idea of being hunted by mere serfs horrifying, and that horror expresses as a protective attitude even toward their opponents within the ruling class. Cabin-dwelling “patriot” bumpkins and dirty hippie street protesters? Fair game! But touch not the elite! They don’t want to let THAT genie out of the bottle.

The more important reason is that words have neither eyes to look through a scope with nor fingers to squeeze a trigger with. That takes a person with the freedom/agency to make decisions.

While actual incitement — as opposed to mean tweets or snarky references — might rise to the level of plausible conspiratorial involvement, an assassination attempt requires overt acts — acquiring a weapon, learning to use it, seeking out or lying in wait for the target, aiming the weapon, firing it.

So far as we know, Joe Biden didn’t play straw buyer to procure a weapon for Routh, nor did Harris give the man a lift in her limo, dropping him off near Trump’s golf course, nor have either of them ever spoken with or directly to him.

All this blather about “civility” and “lowering the temperature” and Person A’s political speechification somehow making Person A responsible for Person B’s actions, even if Person A doesn’t know Person B from Adam is just that: Blather.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can’t, for the most part, buy a gun for someone else or force that someone else to aim and fire it.

We’re all responsible for our own actions. If we let ourselves become obsessed with or deranged by political rhetoric such that we engage in counter-productive violence (hint: If Routh  or Thomas Matthew Crooks had succeeded in killing Trump, the MAGA cult would have become stronger, not weaker), that’s on us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“We’re effectively run in this country,” J.D. Vance told Tucker Carlson in 2021, “be it the Democrats, be it our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

It’s a wonder that remark, made a few days after he announced his candidacy for US Senate, didn’t cost him the election. It didn’t really surface in the public consciousness until after his selection as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate.

There’s oh so much to unpack about Vance’s expressed attitude, but this is an election year, so let’s talk nuts and bolts.

A time-tested rule tells us that politics is about addition, not subtraction. There are exceptions, but for the most part, you win an election by getting more people to like you; getting more people to hate your opponent is your opponent’s job.

Since 2016, Republicans and Democrats alike have worked to reverse that approach, relentlessly attacking their opponents and hoping the “hate vote” goes their way.

Among Americans over 50 years old, 16.5% are childless according to the US Census Bureau. Vance told them he doesn’t like them. Why would they vote for him?

Childlessness among Americans under 50 is a moving target (because there’s still a chance), but in that demographic, a Pew Center survey found that 47% say they’re probably going to remain that way. Why would they believe Vance respects their interests or opinions?

Oh, and 29% of American households own cats.

Dude: Do NOT piss off pet owners.

While Mitt Romney was probably never set to win the 2012 election, the story of a 12-hour family trip taken with his dog, Seamus, locked in a carrier on the car’s roof and suffering from diarrhea certainly didn’t boost his prospects.

This election looks a lot tighter than that one, and Vance stomped right in a puddle of Seamus’s excrement with the “childless cat ladies” remark.

Which may explain the Trump/Vance campaign’s new… let’s call it “pro-pet” … strategy:

“Blame the Haitians! They’re eating your cats, and Harris is the one letting them do it!”

Aside from not being true, that approach is defective in that it’s at odds with Vance’s emphasis on fertility. Haitian women currently give birth at a rate of 2.7 per 100,000 versus American women’s 1.8 births per 100,000. More immigration from Haiti means more kids being born in America.

But hey, maybe the Trump camp’s anti-cat to pro-cat switcharoo is a bellwether, and we can expect politicians to start moving away from the “hate voting” strategy and toward “addition, not subtraction.”

Unfortunately, that would represent an improvement of style, not substance.

Political “addition” usually comes down to promising various constituencies a bigger cut of everyone else’s stuff and hoping the additions prove more noticeable than their accompanying subtractions.

Sure, that puts off a more “civil” vibe, but it’s still about making voters feel like they’re members of the in-group while promising to screw the out-group.

Politics really is a litter box.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“It never got weird enough for me,” says Hunter S. Thompson — or, rather, Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in 1980’s kinda sorta Thompson biopic, Where the Buffalo Roam.  “I moved to the country when the boat got too crowded. Then I learned that President Nixon had been eaten by white cannibals on an island near Tijuana for no good reason at all.”

Thompson died by his own hand in 2005, no longer at the top of his gonzo game but still the reigning champion of American non-fiction (very loosely construed) and psychoactive substance ingestion (perhaps not quite as loosely construed).

I woke up this morning thinking about Thompson, wondering if Election 2024 might just possibly have changed his mind on how weird it can get.

More than 50 years ago, Thompson manufactured, and managed with some success to sell, a rumor that Democratic presidential contender Ed Muskie’s erratic public behavior stemmed from a crippling addiction to a psychedelic, ibogaine.

Muskie’s public meltdowns — and, for that matter, the candidacy-ending revelation of1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton’s  history of shock treatment — seem downright tame by today’s standards, and today’s politicians and celebrities don’t need Thompson’s assistance on the weirdness front.

On September 10, former and possibly future president Donald Trump indignantly informed the American public, on live television, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there” (actual body count so far, one goose … maybe).

Then Taylor Swift, just maybe the most popular person in the world, endorsed Trump’s opponent, vice-president Kamala Harris, dubbing herself (in response to previous weirdness from Trump’s running mate, faux-hillbilly venture capitalist and US Senator JD Vance) a “childless cat lady.”

But wait! There’s more! The richest man in the world (Trump-supporting Elon Musk) then publicly offered to help Swift ditch the “childless” part. You can fill in the details as to how that might happen yourself, but you might not want to on a full stomach.

The “political junkie” side of me kind of wants to see “serious” policy discussions and debates on “the issues,” not a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show with the Kardashian family and Ed Muskie’s ibogaine stash as the guests.

The “voracious reader of history” in me recalls a presidential election  in which dueling polemicists described John Adams’s “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman,” and called Thomas Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Perhaps the venom, and the weirdness, aren’t nearly so new as they feel.

My internal “Hunter S. Thompson fan” voice says “hey, bring on the ibogaine and let’s see what happens.”

Thompson possessed strongly held convictions and tried his hardest to call forth “the better angels of our nature.” He didn’t ACTUALLY consider elections inherently devoid of practical value outside their entertainment potential.

But 2024 just might have convinced him.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY