Trump shooting sparks fascist blood-lust
The right wants to turn this moment into more violence
Saturday evening someone shot at Donald Trump, as you undoubtedly know by now. They missed him, with one bullet hitting a teleprompter and sending shards of glass into his ear, and sadly killing at least one member of the crowd. The shooter is also dead. More details about what exactly happened, how security failed to stop it, and the shooter’s motive was will emerge in the coming hours and days. I don’t want to theorize today, instead we need to look at what prominent conservatives are saying about this event, because their responses, and our collective response, will ripple through this country for months and years to come.
The first thing that multiple major conservative social media accounts and talking heads did in response to an attack on their leader was lie about the shooter. Before the dust had settled at the Pennsylvania Trump rally, MAGA accounts with over a million followers were spreading the disinformation that the person who fired the shots was someone named Mark Violets who was apparently “Antifa” and had already been arrested by local police. Never mind that the shooter had been killed immediately by the Secret Service, or that the photo they had attached to this conspiracy theory was a fairly prominent Italian football fan named Marco Violi, who unfortunately will almost certainly receive threats and harassment because of this fictitious right-wing hack mill.
The real shooter has been identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Multiple journalists confirm that he was a registered Republican. But that truth will not change the approach that MAGA world takes in responding to this event. While the majority of the population might take the shooter’s actual identity into consideration when analyzing this shooting, the fascist movement is deeply uninterested in reality. Several elected Republicans chose their approach almost simultaneously with the transparent “antifa” lies. Without hesitation Congressman Mike Collins, Republican from Georgia, led the charge. Within an hour of the attempt on Trump’s life he tweeted out “Joe Biden sent the orders” and he followed it up shortly after with, “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” Needless to say, the truth doesn’t have a role to play for Rep. Collins. What he and countless others on the right want is political violence. That truth has been apparent for years, and the egging and encouragement done to that end has come largely from one man: Donald Trump.
But for Congressman Collins, the fact of Trump’s propensity for advocating violence doesn’t matter. For fascists, the truth is entirely subjugated by power. And Collins wasn’t alone. Lauren Bobert went on TV not long after the shooting to say, “Joe Biden is responsible for the shooting.” Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement about his father which included the line, “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.” And JD Vance, GOP Senator from Ohio, possible Trump VP pick, and manipulative fascist, tweeted the following:
So we see that, before a single verifiable thing was known about the shooter, MAGA world (far beyond the examples listed above) decided to run with two narratives, one that he was antifa and two that Biden was ultimately responsible for this attack. Anyone who knows anything about the left knows that militant anti-fascists typically aren’t the biggest fans of Joe Biden, but again the truth has no bearing on the conservative response to this event, or to their approach to politics more broadly. What matters is gaining power, and the right has been advocating for the increased use of violence to get that power for some time. January 6th is, of course, the most well-known instance of them acting upon that line of thinking, but from Kyle Rittenhouse to the Proud Boys to multiple lone shooters massacring large numbers of people after becoming radicalized by the right to hate oppressed groups and use violence, their approach has been made clear through their actions and their open declarations of intent.
These events, which reflect the fact that the far-right has committed over 5x as many ideologically motivated homicides as the left since 1990, and which reflect the apparently political bent of this shooter, all have no bearing on the fascist response to this moment. What matters is the legitimation of violence against anyone who is considered an opponent of the right, namely liberals and leftists. In instantly directing the mass anger of the right at these sources, MAGA is implicitly approving of random attacks or other more coordinated actions against anyone who could plausibly be labeled “Antifa,” Biden, and the Democratic Party in the eyes of the fanatics in their ranks.
It’s difficult to see how this doesn’t precipitate an extremely difficult time for the United States as a whole. One of the two major political parties is led by a man who craves violence, and the cohort of men around him have reacted to this shooting by immediately stoking more of it. There may be a boost in the polls for Trump after this, and the rush to condemn this attack may further normalize him to voters in the center, but the potential for the acceleration of political violence could ultimately be a much more significant and far-reaching effect of this event.
I don’t claim to know the future, and what exactly comes next is hard to know. But there is at least one piece of this we don’t have to guess. The fascist movement used the hours immediately after the shooting to blame liberals and the left and stoke anger at people who were completely unrelated to this attack. And we know that these statements follow years of comments by Trump and others to much the same effect.
So this moment will, I hope, lead many of us to think more seriously about what it means to protect one another, protect ourselves and our neighbors. We’ve seen fascist mobs in the streets, we’ve seen them storm the capitol, and now we’ve seen an attempt on the former President’s life. This act does not exist in isolation, but rather in the context of years of escalating rhetoric and violence. And the response to it being more escalatory rhetoric should give us pause. The future we need to prepare for likely includes more political violence, and it’s hard to know how that could spill out the sides, how it could manifest in our lives. It’s a time to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Talk with neighbors right now, today. Find those willing to take this seriously, and think about community defense. Think and plan with others who are willing to organize, who are ready to build real power on the left, or who are ideally already organized and engaged in this struggle. That means finding formal groups in your community, if they already exist, or working to form them if they don’t.
It’s been easy to take the stability of the United States for granted for many decades, and I’m not saying that will end tomorrow. Yet years of growing strain and rising violence have led to this event, and the forces causing this escalation won’t dissipate any time soon. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But that doesn’t mean we despair. Fascists are not despairing, they are agitating and galvanizing and chomping at the bit. They want power, and only an organized populace stand in their way. We are the one force capable of saving ourselves, if we build the power to defend one another and reshape society. In times like this, the only way out is through, and the only way through is together.
P.S. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to getting organized, this recent piece has multiple ways to get involved, and links that I hope are helpful: www.jphilll.com/p/so-what-now