EDITORIAL – Assassination attempt no laughing matter

Jokes, memes, and conspiracy theories quickly became part of the fallout after an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on July 13.

Thomas Matthew Crooks was the shooter and days after the shooting was thought to have acted alone. His action killed a bystander and wounded two others.

Initially much of the reaction was exactly what you’d expect.

The following day, President Joe Biden urged people to cool down, saying while passions can run high, we must never descend into violence.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence – for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” he said in his national address.

He reached to Donald Trump and spoke to him with well-wishes.

Trump has called for national resilience since the shooting as well.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also reached out to Trump to express his support.

These are the reactions we should see.

Even if we feel that our world would be better off without some people in it, that shouldn’t inspire support for those who seek to put that into practice.

Politics is cutthroat. Neither the left nor right is any stranger to rhetoric. Many would say the Republicans have been far better at that in the past, inspiring things like the anti-vaccination movement, and helping push the fear of so called 15-minute cities. They’ve inspired those impressionable enough to believe in QAnon which states that a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles is somehow at war with Trump, who they also still believe is somehow Christian and a good person.

The left has proven that they too can descend into senseless conspiracy theories.

It took only moments after the shooting before liberals began flooding social media platforms.

They said the blood on former president Donald Trump’s ear was from a theatrical gel pack and that the shooting was false flag involving cooperation between the Secret Service and the Trump campaign.

This phenomenon, referred to as “Blue Anon” is part of many liberal conspiracy theories online.

Like the Trump movement itself, those on the left see this as a battle of good vs. evil, one that goes far deeper than meets the eye.

They say Biden was drugged before the recent debate, that the media coverage highlighting Biden’s many gaffes was part of a secret agenda. Seems that the “fake news” battle cry of the right has also been co-opted by the left.

The right also chose the moment to politicize the event, claiming it is linked to the rhetoric of the left.

CTV News was just one news agency that featured a series of anti-gun guests who lashed out at those on the right for politicizing the event but had no problem trying to further their own agenda while the blood of the victims was still wet.

It’s not that their call for more gun control in the U.S. is wrong. But if one wants to politicize a tragedy, they should do their homework first.

At the time these so-called experts were spouting their reactions with absolutely no accountability sought by the host, they weren’t even sure what type of gun was used.

They didn’t know how the person got the gun, whether it was legal, stolen or modified and if he’d had a criminal record or a history of mental illness.

Both the U.S. and Canada live with freedom of speech.

That means that election campaigns are going to continue getting heated, and the characters themselves will become more polarizing.

Ben Burgis, in a column written for jacobin.com, admitted he’s no friend of Donald Trump, a man he described as “a grotesque figure on any reasonable accounting” and “a bubbling fountain of overheated political rhetoric who tried to overturn a democratic election and often spreads incendiary and dehumanizing rhetoric about liberals, the media, undocumented immigrants and so on”.

Yet he too understood that this was not a time for jokes.

Memes and jokes that suggest it would be a good thing if the shooter had better aim are not acceptable.

We don’t have to give up our ideas on who would make a good or a bad president.

Chris Truax, an opinion contributor to thehill.com, wrote a column saying the shooting was wrong but that didn’t mean Trump is right.

“The assassination attempt was pure evil,” he wrote. “Every decent person will condemn it whole heartedly.”

But he insists it is perfectly possible to condemn political violence and dangerous rhetoric while declaring that Trump is a dangerous person to lead the nation.

And that’s the space we all need to occupy. Regardless of political stripe we should all be able to condemn such an action.

And yet we also must continue to exercise our freedom of speech in promoting or criticizing someone we think is worthy of it.