In the wake of another would be assassination attempt of Donald Trump we get this nagging question. Obviously, there are any number of rabbit holes we could go down here. A quick moment in both right wing and left wing echo chambers will show us all of these rabbit holes. I saw one on the right that saw this as some sort of Black Rock deep state kind of thing. The ones on the left question whether this was manufactured to distract from the fact that he got his butt kicked on national television. For the moment I am going to dismiss both of those. It’s not that I necessarily think neither is possible, but I think the simplest of explanations is more probable.

I also think that jumping to conspiracy theories becomes a nasty habit. We normally decry this thing on the right, so we want to make sure we are not simply doing the same thing on the left. The most plausible explanation is that these were two deranged souls that had their own motivations for doing this. Again, this is where each silo manages to put their own spin on it. Shooter number one wore a Trump hat in school, but had also donated to Democratic causes. The second voted for Trump in 2016, Vivek Ramaswamy in the last primary. However, he also supposedly donated to Democratic causes. Everyone is an enigma if we go back far enough and pull all of the evidence. So, again I’m not making any definitive statements here.

We can’t even say that they were activated by hateful rhetoric on either side. What we can definitively say is that one side uses hateful rhetoric far more often than the other. It is not even close. For J.D. Vance to call for cooler heads to prevail less than 48 hours after admitting that he made up a story about migrants eating pets is outrageous even for him. He put thousands of lives in peril as right wing violent actors went to work essentially destroying a quiet community that may have had its issues (who doesn’t) but was seemingly getting along just fine without his “help.” Essentially, the Vance argument is that we should not call a fascist a fascist and we should not repeat or quote the things he has actually said because it will make him look bad and might cause some people to target him. Got it.

The truth is fairly simple and most sane Americans know it. This is a case where the arsonist is blaming the victims for the fire he has started. Anyone that wants to look at the numbers are free to look them up for themselves. Don’t simply take their word for it. Who is responsible for most of the violent rhetoric and actual political violence? I an already tell you because I’ve done the research. What I also know is that the cult either doesn’t hear the rhetoric or remember it as violent. When I’ve talked to friends and family that are MAGA they will pretend that dear leader has never said the things he has said.

This isn’t hard to understand. We have seen it happen to numerous demagogues throughout history. Was George Wallace an innocent victim or was a hateful bigot that suddenly became a victim of his own vitriol? I know many of you know for sure. While we can’t convince MAGA of these inconvenient facts, we can rest assured that we are on the right track. They want us to stop saying things they know to be true. They want us to be afraid to say the things that are actually making a dent. We can’t convince MAGA but we can ignore them.