By contemporary US standards, the reaction to what was clearly an attempt to assassinate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist, which ended up with her elderly husband severely beaten with a hammer, was unsurprising. Fox News commentators blamed Democrats for the attack and expressed sympathy for the attacker by suggesting he’d been harshly treated. Republicans used the attack to claim Democrats were soft on crime. Right-wing commentators claimed the attack was a hoax and a false flag operation. Elon Musk, who is committed to restoring extremism, hate speech and conspiracy theories to Twitter, personally spread misinformation about the attack.
In a country where the president tried to incite an insurrection to overturn his election loss, where right-wing terrorism has for years been identified by law enforcement agencies as the country’s biggest security threat, where anti-Semitism is surging and where right-wing Republicans routinely threaten political opponents with violence or murder, it seems one more step along the way to civil war.
Much of the US mainstream media continues to treat the rise in violence and hate speech as a both-sides problem, the result of polarisation for which Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans. Some major outlets, like The Washington Post, have begun explicitly pushing back against both-sideism, noting that it is Republicans who have become more extreme and more hateful in their rhetoric — a process that began with the Tea Party movement, which transformed into openly racist “birtherism” about the first Black president, and saw its full flowering in Trump and an explosion in conspiracy-theorist thinking within the mainstream GOP.
Read the article by Bernard Keane in Crikey.