Rafael Perez: America is trapped in a dangerous hysteria spiral

A gunman pretending to be a policeman shot and killed Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and injured state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

The accused perpetrator, 57-year old Vance Boelter is now in custody after a two-day search. According to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other officials, the rampage was, “a politically motivated assassination.” 

His family and friends have described him as a highly conservative and religious person and a Trump supporter who listened to the Infowars podcast – the show is hosted by Alex Jones, an inflammatory personality who is known for spreading far-right conspiracies including the Sandy Hook “false-flag” conspiracy that led to a judge ordering Jones to pay $1.3 billion to the families of victims. 

The shootings are the latest examples of what many lawmakers and analysts have referred to as an alarming upwards trend in politically motivated violence. Researchers at Chapman University noted that there has been a consistent rise in threats against public officials beginning in 2017 following the election of Donald Trump. A study at Princeton last year found that threats and harassment against officials are up an additional 87% compared to 2022.

These numbers reflect the reality that we have seen with our own eyes during events like the January 6th insurrection, the arson attempt at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, the 2017 Congressional baseball game shooting, and the attempted assassinations of President Trump, among many others. 

Recent political violence in the US has not been limited to elected officials. We’ve seen numerous instances of protesters clashing with counter-protesters and civilians targeting each other because of their perceived differences. 

The explanation for this trend is not too difficult to discern: since 2016, there has been a noticeable departure by politicians from the practice of treating each other with civility, an increase in apocalyptic political rhetoric used by politicians and also, bad actors on social media platforms have steadily learned how to most effectively sow division and misinformation. 

While there are surely additional contributing factors, it is arguably most important to focus on the lack of civility and the political rhetoric coming directly from elected officials since the effectiveness of other factors would be largely diminished in the absence of the vitriol. 

We can state the relationship between them in this way: if politicians weren’t constantly warning about the momentous threats presented by the opposing party, there would be less vitriolic content for bad actors to exploit and build upon across social media platforms, and therefore, individuals would be significantly less likely to perceive others as threats that warrant aggression.

The easy answer here, already posed by many, is that politicians should tone down the rhetoric. Senator Amy Klobuchar stated, “We in Washington, throughout our country, people who are engaging in this rhetoric that has inflamed an already difficult time in our country have to look in the mirror.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Adam Schiff stated that, “We all have to acknowledge on both sides of the aisle the need to bring about a more civil discourse, but the need to condemn political violence no matter who the target is.”

This solution is not one that many politicians, on either side of the aisle, will be willing to embrace despite their claims to the contrary. Following the attempted assassination of President Trump, some were hopeful that the near-death experience might cause Trump to realize that the consequences for all of his hyper-inflammatory tweets and speeches could fall directly on his head. That dream quickly evaporated and Trump went right back to claiming that the country was dying and that Democrats were killing babies. 

Nowadays Trump is busy claiming that the situation in our cities is so dire that military intervention is needed on our streets. The reality is that there is no prospect for Trump to tone down his destructive message and Democrats understand this. His total apathy towards political violence was evident when he pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists. 

We are currently stranded within a vicious cycle where each side must escalate the accusations against the other. For politicians, the answer to all of this violence is not to quell the division that has overtaken the country – for them, the solution is for us to pay for more of their bodyguards. 

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.