David Neiwert on the TVUUC shooting
David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville:
In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of xenophobic brutality: functionally speaking, it gives violent -- and frequently unstable -- actors permission to act on these impulses. People like this always believe they're standing up for what "real Americans" think.
This is more complex than a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship between incitement and bloody action. Hate rhetoric (at least in this country) is agitprop for ditto-heads; more broadly, it serves as a channel for focusing social and political frustration, and the irrationality of that focus is entirely beside the point. To the murderer, the only thing that matters is that his paranoia and frustrations have an easily identifiable target with a justification handed to him by someone else. A murderer acting on hate rhetoric is still responsible for his own actions of course, but the fact that the rhetoric is given such a wide, mainstream audience lends credibility and support to the murderer's own thoughts that he would otherwise be hard-pressed to muster.
The only difference between the murderer and the celebrity who panders such filth on the radio is the willingness to pull the trigger on a crowd of innocents. The man who murdered those people on Sunday merely did what Limbaugh, Savage, Coulter, and their ilk have been advocating for years.
Incitement to violence is not protected speech in this country, and although the rhetoric of right-wing hatemongers might not technically qualify as "incitement" under a legalistic, picayune definition of the word, Sunday's assailant is nevertheless the poisonous fruit of their malignant tree.
They own him.
In a karmic sense if not in a technically legalistic one, they and their supporters are accessories to the murder of innocents.