INCITEMENT > ACTION

How does the cross-over occur?

When Donald Trump put up a video at Truth Social, his social media website, showing a painting of Joe Biden trussed up, lying in the flatbed of the pick up truck on which the image was painted, a firestorm of critcism was ignited.

I was not immune. As soon as I saw the image on twitter, without investigating context (naughty of me), I responded

Although among the first—because of the fluke of being on twitter when the image began to circulate—I wasn’t the only person to be exercised by the image. It has continued to ripple in the press as an example of Trump’s outrageousness and a warning of the threat he poses to democracy.

That outrageousness is part of his game plan. It keeps him at the center of everyone’s attention. An outrage a day. His Easter ravings on Truth Social have already erased the Biden trussed-up image controversy for much of the media. Tomorrow there will be something else.

But I want to stay focused on the Biden outrage. At one level, the image of Biden tied up and helpless is a modern version of hanging in effigy. It’s an ugly thing but it is a form of political speech. It usually represents, for the person who goes to the trouble of making the effigy, or image, the end point of action. It’s a way of saying, I wish you were dead. And wishing is very far from action.

But at another level it is a form of incitement—an encouragement to those more inclined to action that there are people who will defend and applaud them for killing the perceived enemy.

How does incitement cross into action? Where does responsibility lie?

Reverend Ian Paisley inciting a protestant crowd at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles

In the mid 1990s, I covered the political process in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement for NPR. Early on I got to know the leaders of a small, working class party on the Loyalist (Protestant) side, called PUP, Progressive Unionist Party. One of them was Billy Hutchinson. Like many in the PUP, Hutchinson had been a paramilitary in the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). In 1974, at the age of 19, he had participated in the cold-blooded murder of two Catholic men walking to work. He was sent to the Maze prison for life. While in prison he gave himself the education he had never had in school, became committed to politics as opposed to violence, and was paroled after fifteen years.

He took me around the council estate (housing project) where he had grown up. While we were walking around he explained the connection of the UVF to Ian Paisley. It’s too convoluted to go into here, Ulster is a small place with incestuous and incredibly tangled webs of political and paramilitary intereaction. But the key thing was this: the UVF was closely associated with Paisley and teen-age Hutchinson had fallen under the spell of the firebrand preacher, a hate-filled Christian and cynical politician, a deadly combination as anyone familiar with American political Christianity knows.

Hutchinson made it clear that his early steps towards violence were inspired by listening to Paisley’s speeches. And his hatred for Paisley came after he was in prison when the preacher referred to all paramilitaries as scum. He was behind bars for life for acting on the man’s incitements and now the man was denying ever having encouraged violence.

I can attest to Paisley’s rhetorical power. During the 1998 campaign to ratify the Good Friday Agreement—the people of Northern Ireland had to endorse it in a referendum—I went to Paisley’s church in Ballymena. Paisley, of course, was against the Good Friday Agreement. The church was large and packed but it had no sound system—Paisley was a shouter and didn’t really need amplification—so I had to go right down front to the dais and hold my microphone up to record his speech/sermon.

Paisley almost immediately began an attack on the press. We were biased against “The good people of Ulster”. There was never any doubt that the only “good” people in Ulster were those who agreed with him. The diatribe was occasionally funny, I have to admit, but mostly harsh and as the only visible representative of the press in the hall, down front, kneeling, arm extended upward with a microphone it was very awkward. The comments about lying journalists were not spoken softly or with any rough Ulster humor. A guy in his sixties in the front row, about five feet away was staring aggressively at me, his face getting redder and redder.

Then he hissed loudly, Kill him.

Paisley heard it and backed away from the rhetorical harshness and reminded people journalists were simply doing a job. Then moved on to attacking the betrayal the Good Friday Agrement represented. The man’s face remained red but his mouth stayed shut.

I was lucky hate-filled words, inciting words, amplified and repeated can lead to action, as Billy Hutchinson would attest.

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"Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."

Those were the last words President John F. Kennedy ever heard. They were spoken by Nellie Connally, wife of Texas governor John Connally. A few seconds after she said them the first bullet struck the President.

Earlier in the day, Kennedy had said to his wife, Jacqueline,

“We’re heading into nut country today,”

Dallas was the epicenter of right-wing incitement rhetoric in 1963. It was vicious and lie-filled and lacked only modern media’s distribution capability to spread a message virally and almost at the speed of light via the internet to be a dominant force in American culture. Even without this mass dissemination, the words reached Washington and at the White House and some Kennedy aides urged him to cancel the trip.

The role that rhetorical incitement played in the events of November 22, 1963 is still debated. Primarily because Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-wing extremist. But who knows? There are still enough lacunae in the history of that day that it is impossible to say for certain that the murder was simply the work of a deranged lone gunman who described himself as a Marxist.

There was a “general atmosphere of hate” in Dallas, according to William Manchester’s “The Death of a President”, a 1967 book written at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she later tried and failed to stop publication).

The book is a deeply reported account of the time and place where the murder took place, as well as a minute by minute exploration of the assassination. Manchester by and large agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone, but he took strong exception to the Commission’s view that the atmosphere of hate played no part in Oswald’s actions.

Manchester identifies a factor which can’t be quantified that played a critical role in the event.

“Something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.”

It is hard not to recognize in those words an apt description of America today.

Stridency and shrill hysteria is now an omnipresent and monetized part of the American media landscape. It has been for at least three decades. The intention of Fox News and other places is incitement while making money. You can certainly point to these outlets and other online sources as a major contributor to the violence that lone gunmen have perpetrated at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston SC and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh PA.

Major acts of violence against leading politicians in the US however, have been rare over the last 40 years. Possibly because of better security and surveillance. That hasn’t stopped people making death threats. Nancy Pelosi received more than 400 in her time as Speaker of the House. When a mob incited by Donald Trump ransacked the Capitol on January 6th they went looking for Pelosi. Their intent was to do more than put their feet on her desk.

Trump in some ways is a Paisley-like demagogue pressing the incitement button but leaving himself room to take no responsibility for the actions of followers. But he he also gives the impression that if a follower were to kill his political opponent he wouldn’t mind.

The US today is as riven as a whole as Dallas was in November 1963. One segment of the population is in thrall to the rhetoric of a presidential candidate who trades in incitement and it is only a matter of time before it leads someone to action.

Because, as the late Senator Mike Mansfield said just after Kennedy’s assassination, "the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice, and the arrogance” will converge in a “moment of horror to strike him down”