The Right is Missing their Last Chance to Stop the Violent Rhetoric

Some on the right are barely masking their support for the slaughter of innocents at Club Q. The rest deny there’s any problem with their extreme rhetoric at all.

by Evan Urqhart

don’t give up hope

The right wing press are seizing on the thinnest possible threads to loudly proclaim the violence at Club Q in Colorado Springs was no hate crime, the right has done no wrong, and most importantly they will not change. Rather than expressing concern over the extreme rhetoric that created a climate of terror in the LGBTQ+ community even before this shooting, the tone is one of a brainy alien who has today discovered nonbinary identities exist, and has no idea what they mean except that they conclusively prove the Colorado Springs shooting couldn’t possibly be the fault of Christian right nationalist rhetoric which has scapegoated LGBTQ+ people in apocalyptic terms.

In the aftermath of the Pulse shooting, where 49 people were killed in a gay nightclub. there were attempts on the right and center to minimize the gay identities of the victim and the venue and to blame the shooter’s Muslim religion for the act. Today, a heterosexual veteran who charged the gunman and saved countless lives is facing harassment as a “groomer” from the far right, a story the right wing press seems to find beneath their notice.

All of this was predicted. There’s no end game when you smear your political opponents with such heinous lies except for violence, and the violence is unlikely to recede now without concerted action from leaders on the right to stop the lies, stop the incitement, condemn the violence without excuses or hesitation, and calm the frenzy they’ve been feeding for so long. We don’t except anything like this to happen, but it’s still important to say that it could. Everyone on the right is making a choice, from the 22 year olds contemplating mass shootings, to Tucker Carlson, to Ron DeSantis, and beyond. They could choose differently, at any time. They could, and if they do not, it is because they have decided that violence in the pursuit of political power is acceptable. The time for pretending that’s not what this is is over. Now our only path forward is to be crystal clear about the environment created by the right wing press, the stakes, and the blood that is on their hands, both now and in the future, because of the dark path these writers, politicians, demagogues, and pundits knowingly chose.