The “Both Sides” Scam: How False Balance Fuels Extremism

When pundits blame tone instead of truth, they let one party weaponize threats and lies without consequence…

As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.

That an alleged leftie shot Kirk is the exception that proves the rule.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.

Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.

Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.

The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either; Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.

With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.

Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted.

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy; nonetheless all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.

The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand.

Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here.

After Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the “groomer” slur against queer people exploded by more than 400% because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.

Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.

This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6th rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The RNC later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.

The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died as a result): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.

When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants; President Biden revoked it, but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.

Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.

And, as Jessica Valenti points out:

“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”

And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric. Laura Loomer just posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it.

Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote, “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox Host Jesse Waters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.” Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.

Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy; that thug is now governor of Montana.

And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third; Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.

Violence is their brand.

And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.

Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.

I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.

After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, Trump refused to even call Governor Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.

While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.

On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Joe Biden’s 2020 speech spelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.

So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.

Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.

It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images.

They are not.

One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.

None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.

Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. He posted:

“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”

Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.

These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.

If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.

— Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.”
— Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.”
— Stop normalizing threats against election workers.
— Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.

When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.

Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.

Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Both Sides Scam”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
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