By Howie Silbiger
The American left has a problem with political violence, and although it doesn’t encompass all aspects of the leftist philosophy, it is just prevalent enough to taint the entire movement. At first, it was subtle, but, overtime this phenomenon has become mainstream and it poses a serious threat to society.
Yesterday, a man walked into the Washington Hilton armed to the teeth. He rushed past the Secret Service detail at the metal detectors and tried to make it to the door of a ballroom hosting the White House Correspondence Dinner. In that ballroom sat the President, Vice President and all members of the US Cabinet. The attempted assassin was taken down by the Secret Service, identified and is being processed through the system. One Secret Service agent was shot in the melee and is recovering from his injuries.
These are the facts; An attempted assassination, caught on surveillance camera, completely verifiable.
Moments after the news was broadcast, the leftist online “influencers” began to broadcast, many with livestreams. Before anyone had a chance to figure out what was happening, these “influencers” started steering the conversation away from an assassination attempt to something more sinister. They started floating the idea that President Trump orchestrated the assassination attempt to further his goal of building a grand ballroom at the White House.
It sounds ludicrous and the idea that a political figure would orchestrate an attempt on his own life to gain sympathy for a cause should be laughed out of the room. Instead, it hangs there, as plausible, repeated by many “influencers”. The argument just vague enough that it never has to be defended, only repeated unchallenged.
The reflex is the same, over and over again. An ICE facility gets attacked and within hours the focus shifts to messaging. Tesla locations are firebombed and the debate turns to whether outrage is being applied evenly. Charlie Kirk is assassinated in front of thousands of people, his murder recorded and aired online for millions to witness, and the first wave of reaction isn’t about how a young father and political activist was killed for expressing an opinion, it turned to question if it was staged, if did it really happen and Charlie Kirk is hiding on an isolated island somewhere and whether his murder, assuming it happened, benefits the wrong side.
The details of the events never get a chance to breathe, they get buried, and that is not accidental.
The left learned a long time ago that if things are left to sit, if facts are allowed to accumulate, if people are forced to look at them one after another instead of one at a time, a pattern starts emerging and it’s not very flattering to the political left. Once the population starts noticing the pattern, it becomes a lot harder to keep pretending that there isn’t one.
This practice didn’t come out of nowhere. It started years ago, when the media and society stopped holding people accountable for their language and actions. Leftist hateful speech, calls for violence and actual violence were shrugged off as edgy, ironic or understandable cultural response. When riots erupted during the Occupy Wall Street protests or during the Black Lives Matters protests, the media cushioned it as justified political unrest. Politicians accepted it as a natural response to societal oppression, and it got shrugged off.
The lack of response to these major events allowed society to accept them as normal, so when famous communist podcaster Hasan Piker declared that landlords and capitalists should be murdered and he’d love to see their blood flowing on the streets, it didn’t trigger alarms, it got clipped, shared, laughed at, supported and turned into online content. If it goes too far, it gets walked back and forgiven. It gets framed as a joke, something that really wasn’t meant to take seriously.
The cycle is simple, say it, let it spread, let it percolate just enough to register, and if there is blowback, soften it, repackage it, move on. On its own, you can just shrug it off, explain it away as ‘just talk’.
Except, it never stays on its own.
It sits right next to the real events that are handled with the same instinct to minimize, isolate, explain away, anything to avoid dealing with them head on. At the center of it is an assumption that this kind of violence doesn’t belong to the left, that if it shows up, it must be something else, something misinterpreted, something that needs to be reworked until it fits the narrative.
That’s where the false flag reflex comes from. It’s never from evidence, never from investigation, it’s just a refusal to accept the facts that are sitting in plain view.
This phenomenon is not solely a leftist problem, but it manifests very differently on the right.
Alex Jones built Infowars and his entire career on claiming everything is a false flag. He claimed that the 2012 school shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School which killed 20 kindergarten and 1st grade students and some staff was a false flag. He claimed that both the victims and their parents were paid actors and continued the claim for years.
Eventually the parents of the victims sued Jones who lost his case and received a $1.5 billion judgement. Whatever was left of his operation after the court cases fell apart after the sentencing and his Infowars website is now owned by the satirical website, The Onion.
Jones paid the price for his non violent actions, leftists never do, not even for the violent ones.
The same line gets crossed after every politically violent incident, and by now it’s not even subtle. The left reaches for the same reflex you’d expect from Alex Jones, just dressed up in language that sounds a little more respectable. They question, they float it, they wink at it, they dress the rhetoric up just enough to pass as commentary. It spreads, it lingers, and eventually someone unstable hears it, believes it, and acts on it. Then the distance appears. It was just talk. It was taken out of context. Nobody meant it like that. Meanwhile, people are being wheeled into hospitals.
What never seems to happen is accountability. The people who push the rhetoric, who nudge the idea along, who normalize it, rarely face consequences. Their words get folded into the category of legitimate political expression, no matter how far they go or how often they brush up against the line.
And no matter how ugly it gets, it keeps getting excused, because it lives inside a political space that still insists it is rational, still insists it is grounded, even while producing the kind of thinking that can push a schoolteacher to get on a plane from California to Washington and try to force his way past the Secret Service to kill a sitting president.
That’s the trick holding it all together. If every incident is immediately cast as questionable, then none of them ever have to be accepted at face value. If everything is isolated, then no pattern can ever form. If every extreme statement is brushed off as performance, then nothing anyone says is ever taken seriously until it’s too late.
There was a time when something like an attempted assassination was rare, and when it happened it sent shockwaves through society. It forced a kind of clarity that people recognized a line had been crossed. That kind of clarity has disappeared.
The internet and instant communication, has allowed people to quickly step around the line, easily talk past it and break down whatever little resistance there is to bypass it. At some point, the act itself almost becomes irrelevant to the story created around it.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor in Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
