Lee Harvey Oswald | Ted Rall's Rallblog

Violent Speech Might Not Cause Violent Acts. So What?

July 18, 2024•

With the exception of those who explain themselves, like John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz, political assassins tend to take their motives to the grave. Though the real reasons for their acts tend to be personal to the point of quirky—like John Hinckley hoping to impress Jodie Foster—Americans often point the finger at inflammatory rhetoric. Dehumanizing speech, we assume, is bound to prompt some weak-minded weirdo to act out.

Anti-JFK “wanted for treason” posters distributed in Dallas shortly before the November 1963 assassination were cited as evidence that right-wing extremism had created a toxic atmosphere, implying that the city itself had sort of killed the president. But Dallas didn’t shoot Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald did. Though his motives were nebulous, his politics leaned Left.

After Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by her constituent in 2011, liberal media outlets took note of a map tweeted by a PAC associated with Sarah Palin released nine months earlier, which displayed targets over districts, including Giffords’, being challenged by GOP candidates. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, the media asked “whether there is a connection between” such “extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery” as that published by Palin and “actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be?”

There was no connection. The shooter had never seen Palin’s map. Yet, when Palin sued The New York Times over an editorial that drew a direct line between her map and the murder attempt, she lost—and was ordered to pay the Times’ legal fees.

Correlation does not equal causation. What common sense dictates must be true—what feels true—that violent talk begets real-world violence, trumps what actually is true: mentally disturbed people do crazy things sometimes.

Still, the toxic-talk-is-dangerous meme persists. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. J.D. Vance tweeted/Xed after the shooting of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

“Directly”? There isn’t even evidence of an indirect link.

The alleged shooter, 20, was a registered Republican who donated $15 to a liberal PAC in 2021. Confusing! He’s dead, no one has found a manifesto, and at this point Vance is just resorting to the usual speculation.

It seems unlikely that any sturdy peer-reviewed study of political assassins and would-be assassins will emerge any time soon that would settle the question of the relationship, if any, between a culture of violence—dehumanization, intimidation, threats of physical harm and actual killings and assaults—and attempts on the lives of politicians. Even so, an incident like the shooting in Pennsylvania should make Americans ask themselves whether lowering the temperature might not be its own reward.

As a leftist who does not support Trump, I was shocked not only at the stream of vitriol that swamped social media after the Pennsylvania shooting, much of it bemoaning the fact that Trump survived, but at the willingness of so many people to express such extreme opinions in public, under their own names, in an instantly searchable medium. Either they are unafraid of social repercussions or, more likely, it never crossed their minds that there might be any.

It is not hard to imagine why. These opinions are now mainstream.

Vance is right about one thing. Throughout the current campaign and going back at least to the start of Trump’s first run for the White House in 2016, Democrats and their media allies have characterized Trump and his MAGA movement as an existential threat to democracy.

Some went further.

Five days before Trump was shot, First Lady Jill Biden told a gathering of Georgia Democrats: “Does Donald Trump know anything about military families? No. He disparages those who sacrifice for our country. His own chief of staff said he called POWs and those who died in war losers and suckers. He’s evil.”

There is no need to regurgitate a litany of overheated hate speech, especially in recent years. We all hear it. Demonization of political opponents, along with the determination that opposing partisans are not merely misguided or ignorant but willfully malign, is as old as politics. It is worth noting, however, that our government has normalized political assassinations overseas in a way that makes it difficult to (pretend to) be shocked when they occur here. President Obama had Osama bin Laden whacked rather than brought to justice, President Trump rubbed out a top Iranian general as casually as smooshing a bug (we’re not even at war with Iran) and even the press parrots official statements that sanitize such state-sanctioned murders with anodyne words like “eliminated,” “got rid of” and “took out.”

We may never know whether there is a link, direct or otherwise, between a culture that treats killing cavalierly and citizens who resort to violence against our leaders. Assuming that there’s no connection, however, what would be the harm in speaking more gently and civilly to one another? Depersonalizing our politics might open the space to address actual issues, some of which—like the high expense of and difficulty accessing psychiatric care—that really are driving us nuts.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

As Long as Enemies of the State Keep Dying Before Trial, No One Should Trust the State

August 19, 2019•

Ted Rall

Image result for jeffrey epstein ambulance There is no other way to say it: it was a political assassination.

Osama bin Laden was unarmed. SEALs captured him alive. Following brazenly illegal orders from Washington, they executed him. “The [Obama] administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead,” The Atlantic reported on May 4, 2011.

State-controlled media outlets like The Atlantic claimed that Obama was desperate to avoid a trial that would give the Al Qaeda leader a “high-profile platform for spreading his extremist views.” Left unsaid, as so much is in the American steno-journalism reminiscent of the Soviet Union, was a more pressing reason to silence the Saudi scion.

As much as the families of 9/11 victims craved justice, it was infinitely more important to the U.S. political establishment to deny bin Laden an opportunity to publicly expound on his ties to the CIA and the CIA-funded Pakistani intelligence agency ISI when they were training and funding the “Afghan Arabs” who fought Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Letting people learn that 9/11 would likely never have happened if not for the CIA would have been…awkward.

Such is the fate of enemies of the state.

Last week, not so much an enemy but a man whose existence had become inconvenient, not exactly to the state but certainly to a cabal of powerful men including a former president as well as the sitting one, joined bin Laden in the kingdom of the dead.

The official narrative of billionaire accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s death shifted faster than a New York subway rider when a homeless guy plops down next to them on a hot day. First they said Epstein had been on suicide watch, then that he hadn’t. Prisons are full of cameras yet there’s still no video of Epstein’s death. Then, suicide watch or not, they claimed he’d been checked on every 30 minutes. Then more like every three hours. The medical examiner said his injuries were consistent with strangulation by a second person but then thought better of it and ruled Epstein’s convenient demise a suicide.

I tweeted the morning of Epstein’s passing: “Bill Clinton is the happiest man in America today.” Clinton flew on Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express” private jet at least six times, including to such sex-tourism destinations as Thailand and Hong Kong. Perhaps he refrained from partaking of the underaged prostitutes and rape victims Epstein stands accused of procuring for his traveling companions. Whatever happened or didn’t, the Epstein-Clinton connection is sketchy as hell.

As is Epstein’s suicide—the first at the Manhattan Correctional Facility since 1998.

At this writing it seems unlikely that we’ll ever know who killed Epstein, whether it be himself or someone else. What we do know is that, if we take the government at its word, it was incompetent and negligent to an unfathomable extent. Being insanely stupid and lazy is its defense.

Now we’re descending into the usual idiotic post-death-of-a-pain-in-the-ass debate between credulists (those who believe anything the government and its pet media say) and conspiracy theorists. Truth: no one knows anything. We weren’t there. The video was—but they deep-sixed that.

We don’t know how Epstein bit it but the fact of Epstein’s death tells us everything we need to know about America today. No matter what, Epstein died because the government let it happen. He was a ward of the state, the highest of high-profile prisoners, a man whose trial stood to expose extreme wrongdoing at the expense of numerous horribly violated victims, yet no one in charge took steps to make certain that he appeared at every hearing happy, healthy and alive.

The powers that be’s carelessness de minimis reflects their confidence that they shall never, ever, be held accountable for anything whatsoever.

So another man vanishes, few questions asked with many left unanswered—intentionally.

So it was with Moammar Khaddafi, the Libyan dictator who signed a deal with the U.S. to rid Libya of a nuclear program only to be blown up by one of Obama’s assassination drones lest he say too much about his relationship with the Bush administration.

So it was with Chris Dorner, the police officer who went on a shooting spree after he was fired by the LAPD, apparently in retaliation for reporting a fellow cop’s excessive force against a mentally-ill suspect, before being hunted down and killed in a cabin the police set ablaze with “pyrotechnic tear gas” cannisters.

So it was with Sandra Bland, the African-American woman beaten, jailed and supposedly suicided by the police for the crimes of failing to signal a lane change, sassiness and the likelihood she would have spoken out about being brutalized.

So it was with a bunch of Nazi war criminals who escaped judgment at Nuremberg.
So it was with Lee Harvey Oswald, whom the authorities couldn’t resist parading before reporters, without screening attendees like Jack Ruby for weapons.

More will die.

It’s better for those in charge.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)