I was struck by today’s response of Sarah Palin to criticism that her rhetoric and “targeting” of Rep. Gifford’s district may have added to the recent massacre in Tucson. In fairness to Palin, the family stated today that Jared Loughner did not watch news or listen to talk radio. However, I was most interested in her claim that the attacks against her and conservative commentators amounted to a “blood libel.”
On her Facebook page, Palin has the following comments:
But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.
Of course, she is not speaking of actual libel. Such criticism of the over-the-top rhetoric of conservative commentators is clearly opinion and not defamation.
“Blood libel” is a term usually associated with religious groups who are accused to killing innocents. Blood libels have a strong anti-Semitic history, such as claims that Jews feed on the flesh or blood of innocent children. For that reason, the Anti-Defamation League has denounced the use of the term — though I do not believe that the simple use of this term is evidence of any anti-semiticism by Palin.
That is a pretty loaded term to use for the criticism over violent terminology and over-heated rhetoric. Indeed, it seems to emphasize a degree of persecution. There is probably some distance between dueling and discourse.
The closest term in torts is “group libel” which (as discussed earlier) is generally difficult to establish.
If either term is relevant, there appears to be an ongoing effort on both sides to tag the other with the massacre. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik stated “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information. . . [Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences.”
Limbaugh has reportedly fired back by saying that the Democratic Party supports Loughner and is “attempting to find anybody but him to blame.”
In the meantime, members are moving toward a spasm of new laws to criminalize speech.
There is of course another obvious possibility: Loughner is mentally unstable and fully motivated by his own personal demons. Of course, this does not mean that we should not reexamine the rhetoric of our politics.
Frankly, I also share the concern of conservative commentators with politicians like Bernie Sanders (who I agree with on many issues) referring to the massacre in fundraising appeals. This massacre has somehow become about the politicians as opposed to the killer or the victims. That alone says something about the state of our politics.
Jonathan Turley
rafflaw,
Malkin, Coulter, Ingraham–the Three Amigas of hateful right-wing Rhetoric.
Right is Right,
It is amazing that you quote Michelle Malkin on a thread discussing the vitriol by conservatives. Talk about the Pot calling the Kettle Black. She is one of the worst offenders of abusive comments on the Right. And that doesn’t even include outright falsehoods that she continues to spew and write about.
Blame Righty: A Condensed History
By Michelle Malkin (Archive) · Friday, January 14, 2011
I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been “far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than” they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It’s time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.
For the past two years, Democratic officials, liberal activists and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Alas, the Obama administration’s political and media foot soldiers have proved themselves incapable of such restraint.
In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).
That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent and undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the “huge anti-immigrant backlash in this country” — never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.
In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration’s report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the tea party, talk radio and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. State Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak singled out tea party activists and blamed “people opposed to health care” for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democratic candidate.
In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in an online magazine post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.” Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed “anti-government” bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, “conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress.” So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville, and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to tea party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church and airlines.
In May 2010, liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.
In August 2010, Democratic supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a “firebombing” at the congressman’s St. Louis office on tea party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, who was enraged over a paycheck dispute.
President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that “bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.” But as the progressive left’s smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/blog/1450/violent_rhetoric_and_the_mentally_ill/
I am actually afraid to put any progressive bumper sticker on my car here in Arizona. and I have been to Obama meetings where people voice the same fears.
There are too many instances here of people getting their car vandalized and keyed to take a chance.
There are also a lot of steep cliffs here. If someone wanted to run you off the road it is a dangerous proposition.
No one wants to take the chance of some meth fueled Beck-Rush-Hannity fan targeting you in your car.
That is the way it is here.
If Loughner was spouting anti war rhetoric, what would people be saying?
Bob,
It’s anti-propaganda, but yes, it is properly qualified as such, ergo there is no deception.
However, since Loughner had clearly picked up some right wing tropes in his pre-shooting ravings, how exactly is that not exacerbation by the right? It need not be traceable to a single source, but he was clearly hooked on some far rightist memes.
Buddha,
The NY Times has also laid the blame on Nietzsche and there is no evidence so far that Laughner’s illness was exacerbated by rhetoric from the likes of Palin, Angle Bachman et. al.
However, if you don’t mind labeling what you’re doing as merely propagandizing, then I guess that’s as good as newscasters prefacing their comments about crimes that have yet to come to court as ‘alleged.’
Slarti: “I’ll let everyone decide for themselves if they think that was a reasonable way to characterize your implication.”
Kevin,
There’s a difference between the act and the result. When speaking of morals we focus on the act–the will of the individual in the moment of choice. The act here is lying and it’s wrong.
The results of the act are many; I merely focused on one. Nonetheless focusing on the results in lieu of the act is to formulate a practical rule and not a moral law.
And Go Jets.
Mike Luckovich cartoon–a different Sarah Palin map:
http://blogs.ajc.com/mike-luckovich/2011/01/13/114-mike-luckovich-on-sarah-palin/
Bob,
I’m saying a nexus is irrelevant to the purpose of anti-propaganda in neutralizing the Right’s use of incitement. Like I’ve been saying all along. However, the NYT article seems to have sources that indicate that incitement by the Right was contributory to the shooter’s decaying mental state if not directly or proximately a cause of the shooting proper. This comports with my earlier statement:
“I submit that ‘culprit’ and ‘likely contributory’ as distinct. Clearly, the culprit is the gunman’s mental instability. However, it is not unreasonable to make the leap that incitement exacerbates mental illness and indeed plays to it.”
Bob said:
and
and
I summarized what I inferred from your comments as:
I’ll let everyone decide for themselves if they think that was a reasonable way to characterize your implication.
Regarding the Jets – I’m happy to be wrong on this one… (I really don’t like the Pats).
So Buddha,
Are you saying there’s a nexus or there’s no nexus?
Slarti: “The suggestion that an action is immoral because in three months the public will have been convinced of something incorrect by other people using a flawed argument in support of the same goal (curbing violent speech) is complete and utter bullshit.”
I agree. What’s your point?
Slarti: “And the Jets are going to get killed (I take no pleasure in that – I hate the Pats – but I believe that it is true).”
Quite.
And the accidentally omitted link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp
Bob,
From the New Your Times:
“What the cacophony of facts do suggest is that Mr. Loughner is struggling with a profound mental illness (most likely paranoid schizophrenia, many psychiatrists say); that his recent years have been marked by stinging rejection — from his country’s military, his community college, his girlfriends and, perhaps, his father; that he, in turn, rejected American society, including its government, its currency, its language, even its math. Mr. Loughner once declared to his professor that the number 6 could be called 18.
As he alienated himself from his small clutch of friends, grew contemptuous of women in positions of power and became increasingly oblivious to basic social mores, Mr. Loughner seemed to develop a dreamy alternate world, where the sky was sometimes orange, the grass sometimes blue and the Internet’s informational chaos provided refuge.
He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.”
Catch that last paragraph and contrast to my more general statement.
“Breanna Castle, 21, another friend from junior and senior high school, agreed. ‘He was all about less government and less America,’ she said, adding, ‘He thought it was full of conspiracies and that the government censored the Internet and banned certain books from being read by us.'”
Really? I wonder where he got such ideas. Certainly not from a toxic environment surrounding political speech.
Or this gem,
“A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, ‘I did not pay with gold and silver’ — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups.”
Yet the toxicity created by the right doesn’t encourage psychotics – my assertion, or this one in particular – the NYT’s assertion.
They assert proximate causal connection. I do not and even asserted that causal connection wasn’t required for the discussion. “If you require direct causal connection to take on destructive rhetoric? Can’t help you, Bob. Direct causal connection or not, this event has put such incitement in the spotlight. And be it an artificial light source or sunlight, it’s still a great disinfectant. If we were talking about prosecuting the likes of Angle and Limbaugh, I’d be with you, but we’re not. We’re talking about neutralizing their ability to effectively incite violence.”
Seems to me your beef is more with the media like the Times, Bob.
Bob,
The suggestion that an action is immoral because in three months the public will have been convinced of something incorrect by other people using a flawed argument in support of the same goal (curbing violent speech) is complete and utter bullshit.
And the Jets are going to get killed (I take no pleasure in that – I hate the Pats – but I believe that it is true).
Bob posted:
[emphasis mine]
Bob,
I said ‘implied’ and I don’t see how the previous passage in the context of the discussion can be seen as anything other than an implication that the discussion involved legislation.
I did like your link on the fundamental theorem of poker, though – I was already familiar with Slansky’s theorem, but I found the discussion interesting…
Bob,
“I’m never one to argue ‘don’t stoop to their level’ since sometimes that’s the only thing the other side understands”
Really?
Could have fooled me.
Wiki defines propaganda as “opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.”
Anti-propaganda is aimed at countering that influence by the same methodology. It is fighting fire with fire.
The desired result is a change in attitudes.
I’m not lying as I haven’t be saying that this particular instance was incitement induced, but rather that incitement creates an atmosphere where these kinds of acts are seen as viable solutions and that incitement appeals to the mentally unstable in general. The exact wording was in response to mespo on another thread:
“mespo,
I submit that ‘culprit’ and ‘likely contributory’ as distinct. Clearly, the culprit is the gunman’s mental instability. However, it is not unreasonable to make the leap that incitement exacerbates mental illness and indeed plays to it.”
A general statement about incitement and lunatics, not a claim that this particular lunatic was anything other than a lunatic.
Now what was that you were never going to argue?
Slarti: “You’re being disingenuous – neither Buddha and I are talking about legislating acceptable speech, we’re talking about telling demagogues who make a living preaching hate and violence that they are pathetic, unAmerican, and should be ashamed of themselves and telling everyone else that not only is there a connection between such speech and actual violence but it is also toxic to our civil discourse and hence our Republic and that we will all be better off if these people are marginalized. The only one being dishonest here is you in implying that we were talking about legislating speech.”
Kevin,
Gotta do some shopping before the Jet game, but quickly stated
I have said nothing about legislating anything. I’m not being dishonest; you’re simply not paying attention.
Buddha,
Because the Left is using the tragedy in Tuscon as leverage against the right, it is intentionally spreading misinformation regarding the facts of the actual shooting.
As a result, here’s what’s going to happen. Within a few months from now there will be a poll; just like the one that asked citizens if they believed there was a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. And just like that poll, this new one will show that more than half the public believes that there was a direct link between Laughner’s actions and the rhetoric from the right.
More uninformed idiocy; just what we need.