Yesterday, an eloquent but hard right political influencer – Charlie Kirk – was assassinated, and almost immediately everyone, particularly Republicans, began to talk about the need to stop political violence.
That’s all well and good, but it’s also hypocritical and worse.
Assassination has no rightful place in a democracy, but neither does sending troops and ICE agents into Home Depots, churches, and schools and arresting and carting off people based on their color, speech, or dress, all too often sweeping up people who are American citizens in the furor of activity to deport as many people as quickly as possible, while trying to “flood the zone,” i.e., to overload the courts and local government to the point where they can’t stop illegal and quasi-legal deportations.
That sort of behavior by the federal government is also political violence, no matter how Republicans rationalize and cover it with the quasi-legal veneer of Executive Orders. Even undocumented individuals who have committed no crimes, other than being here, deserve the protection of the law.
Violence begets violence. It always has.
The way to stop violence isn’t to commit violent acts, but to follow the law – and the Constitution – in enforcing the law.
Right now, in the frenzy to deport, Trump and his allies are stirring up more unrest, fear, and violent reactions. Equally important, too many of these measures aren’t getting rid of immigrant violent criminals. That takes patient, deliberate, long, hard effort. It also takes spending money on preventive measures proven to work.
The fifty-thousand-dollar bonuses for joining ICE are turning immigration enforcement into often-violent bounty-hunting, with the greatest appeal to would-be thugs and toughs.
More empty rhetoric and more forceful measures applied indiscriminately won’t stop or even reduce social, criminal, and political violence, except momentarily where the force is being applied, and if all that force is applied continuously, it will cost far more than funding local law enforcement and community support structures efficiently.
But then, Trump’s never been interested in building strong and effective local government; he’s only interested in building a national power base to become a de facto dictator, and over time that can only increase the violence.