Slate's Emily Tankin reflecting on the MAGA crowd's newfound outrage -- exemplified by thirsty and ambitious VP candidate J.D. Vance -- about violent political speech, which their leader engages in continually:
"It aims to silence criticism. The assassination attempt does not erase the former president’s promises to gut the bureaucracy to better bend it to his will and to deploy the military domestically to carry out mass deportations. It does not allow him to escape criticism of his refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 presidential election or his attempt to invalidate votes cast in majority Black cities for Joe Biden. [snip]
The point is not that Vance and company—in encouraging Trump’s violent language while chastising his political detractors—are hypocritical. They are, but hypocrisy is so common in American politics as to be barely worth noting. Rather, the point is that would-be autocrats and their supporters are not bringing about unity or calm, or lowering the political temperature between rival factions, by blaming those who criticize their political programs." (our emphasis)
We're seeing the results of that hypocritical outrage in parts of the Beltway media, which has turned from trumpeting "Dems in disarray" to tiptoeing around Trump's record of violent rhetoric and hate speech out of presumed sympathy for his near brush with death. Not that we expected anything different from them.
