On Tuesday and again this morning, pipe bombs were mailed to the homes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other prominent Democrats, including far-left billionaire George Soros. CNN was also a recipient of a “suspicious package” that prompted the network to evacuate its New York headquarters.
While some on social media are suggesting this is a “false flag” attack perpetrated by the Left, that is idle speculation at this point. The crimes are brand-new, and the investigation into them is just getting underway.
Which hasn’t prevented the Left from diving in headlong and assigning blame. Newsweek came out with an article shortly after noon noting that Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a Republican, “sent an email to supporters saying he wanted ‘Hillary Clinton’s visit [to the Sunshine State on behalf of DeSantis’s Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum] to be a kiss of death.’” Ergo add DeSantis’s name to the list of suspects.
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Some of the fixing of blame, as Ben Shapiro notes at The Daily Wire, has been indirect. Writing in The Washington Post in a column titled “The apparent attempts at terrorist bombings were absolutely predictable,” liberal pundit Paul Waldman offers this assessment:
Allow me to suggest that “blame” is too narrow a way to make sense of a series of attempted bombings aimed at precisely the people Trump and other Republicans spend a huge amount of time vilifying. We don’t have to look for clues about whether the person responsible has a MAGA hat, or what their party registration is. We don’t have to assign direct blame beyond a reasonable doubt.
But what we can say is this: Given what Trump has done and said, this was absolutely predictable. In fact, it’s a wonder that it took this long.
It’s not just that Trump advocates violence against his political opponents — though he does. It’s that everything about his rhetoric pushes his supporters in that direction, even if the overwhelming majority will never get quite to the point where they’ll actually commit this kind of act of terrorism.
Shapiro offers a host of tweets from liberals great and small that echo Waldman’s sentiments: Trump done it.
To which Shapiro responds:
The proper response to political violence isn’t to blame those who aren’t responsible for political violence — Bernie Sanders wasn’t responsible for the Congressional baseball shootings despite his anti-Republican rhetoric, nor was Barack Obama responsible for the targeting of Dallas police officers despite his critiques of supposedly systemic police racism.
To be more specific, they were no more to blame for those catastrophes than Trump is for this one. Don’t think for a moment, though, that any liberal in today’s hate-filled climate would be willing to acknowledge as much.
Don’t forget, moreover. These reactions follow acts of terrorism that were thwarted. Imagine how much louder these leftists would be shrieking if a bomb had actually gone off.
