We are living through an assassination culture. Three recent attempts on a single public figure are not random. They are the predictable endpoint of a decade of poisoned rhetoric, sloppy reporting, and public figures who trade outrage for clicks. When people are fed anger as news, some of them will act on it. That is not a theory. That is a fact.
It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the latest assassination attempt on President Donald Trump was in a room full of media personalities and journalists who, for 10 years, stoked hate, falsely reported, and, in some cases, irresponsibly promoted violence against the president.
The reckless, unrelenting, and quite careless ‘journalism’ of political activism lost its integrity years ago.
Paid-for talking heads on cable news networks, whether conservative or progressive programming, not only help create a deep divide in America, but as we saw in Butler, Pa, Trump’s golf course in Florida, and Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner, they have created killers who are seen as heroes by half the country.
Donald Trump calls it ‘fake news.’ At the very least, reporting is no longer objective, but rather speculative. Sparse facts intertwined with strong opinions perpetuate what can only be called a big lie, and the very best lies are mostly true. The MSM have become professional in that tactic. Early reporting is sloppy, and based on a need for speed and sensationalism, while truth and facts get lost.
In the ballroom at the DC Hilton Saturday night was CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, who went on the air live to report. With no corroboration of a report from one secret service member to her, she proclaimed that there was confirmation of one person dead. It didn’t happen. Luckily, no one died, but it was too late. Social media was abuzz about one person confirmed dead.
MSM and Democrat politicians famously repeated lies for a decade. From Russian Collusion, Charlottesville, Nick Sandman, J6 Insurrection, to Trump is a Nazi. Saturday night, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted that she was glad Trump was ok. My colleague, Matt Palumbo, pointed out the hypocrisy of that. AOC called Trump a Nazi for years, and he suggests it’s like AOC saying, “I’m glad Adolf Hitler is ok.”
The Right and Republicans have their share of half-truths and lies as well. A quick example of that is the IRS hiring 87,000 agents with guns. That story was rampant on social media for years and even repeated by Donald Trump and most Republican politicians. It wasn’t true, never was.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act doubled IRS spending from $40 billion to $80 billion to hire 87,000 new IRS employees. That number of 87,000 came from a 2021 report by the Treasury Department on what $80 billion could accomplish for the IRS. Democrats and Republicans for years said the IRS was understaffed and the 87,000 new employees were to be hired over a 10-year period, not all at once.
In reality, the IRS had plans to hire 10,000 employees in 2023 and 20,000 in 2024, which barely kept up with attrition from retirements and people quitting. For years, the IRS had around 90,000 employees, and even with the additions in the Inflation Reduction Act, it never had more than 100,000 employees. A net gain of 10,000, not 87,000.
Mainstream outlets have a responsibility they are not meeting. Corrections get buried. Sensational takes travel faster than the truth. When reporters chase the scoop before they confirm basic facts, they create the space where conspiracy thrives. The result is a country where every violent act spawns a hundred wild theories and millions of enraged witnesses who never saw a thing.
There is a political current driving this. Radicalization lives on the left as well as the right. It grows where institutions profit from grievance. Organizations that benefit from labeling and amplifying threats will find ways to keep those threats alive. This is not victim-blaming. It is calling out an industrial incentive that markets anger.
We must demand accountability from the press. We must stop celebrating anonymous outrage designed to sell subscriptions and garner clicks. We must stop normalizing talk that treats violence as entertainment or moral proof. Politicians must choose plain speech over poison.
Everyone is guilty, but who will take responsibility and change course?
If America is to survive this turbulent stretch, we need repair, not revenge. We need institutions that reward truth and leaders who model restraint. Angry Americans have reasons to be furious. That fury must be directed by civic muscle, not by people who profit from chaos. This can only change with leaders who will stop lying and by the people insisting on durable reforms to media, education, home and community.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
