The Ominous Normalization of "Casual" Political Violence on the US Right
A headline from yesterday's New York Times initially seems shocking but, after even a moment's reflection, is not surprising at all: "Republican Senator Attacks Protester." Also unsurprising, but for a very different reason, is that The Times has now changed its headline to this: "Senator Helps Officers Forcibly Remove Protesting Veteran From Hearing." How was the good senator being helpful? The news article under that anodyne headline offers this alarming description:
Video footage of the episode shows [Brian] McGinnis, dressed in a Marine uniform with his arm hooked around a door in the Hart Senate Office Building during a subcommittee hearing on military readiness. Three Capitol Police officers struggle to grab Mr. McGinnis and pull him from the door when Senator [Tim] Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, dives into the fracas and pulls Mr. McGinnis by the leg.
“No one wants to fight for Israel,” Mr. McGinnis shouts before an audible cracking noise is heard. Mr. Sheehy then hooks his arm around Mr. McGinnis’s arm, which is still bent around the door, and yanks.
Also unsurprisingly, Montana's junior senator posted video of the incident online and pounded his chest about how tough he is: "Capitol Police were attempting to remove an unhinged protestor from the Armed Services hearing. He was fighting back. I decided to help out and deescalate the situation. This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one." Nicely deescalated, Senator! Whatever the law is with regard to protesters in the Capitol, it certainly does not call for non-police officers to "help" through what amounts to a vigilante pile-on.
Unfortunately, this taste for what I will call casual violence is hardly limited to this most recent incident. The people who have been fed nonstop outrage bait for decades are now deciding that it is not enough to use law enforcement officers, or even masked and unaccountable immigration agents, to punish the people they hate. More and more, they seem to want in on the fun personally. I use the modifier casual to describe such incidents in which non-violent incidents become suddenly violent, where someone in power makes a bland decision that a disfavored person is going to be harmed, even when doing so is not necessary (in degree if not in kind).
To be sure, most of the people in the Trump Administration and its followers do not dirty their own hands. One of Senator Sheehy's colleagues, Senator Alex Padilla of California received this (mis)treatment when he tried to argue with now-former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem nine months ago:
In videos of the incident shared on social media, Padilla identifies himself in front of an array of news cameras and says he has “questions for the secretary” as two men, apparently with the Secret Service, push him away from Noem’s lectern and toward the door.
He seemed to be challenging Noem’s assertion that immigration agents had focused on arresting “violent criminals” when guards pushed him into the hallway. Three armed men, two of them in FBI uniforms, forced Padilla onto the ground and handcuffed him behind his back. Another tells the person recording the video, who identifies himself as a Padilla staffer, to stop recording.
Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller provided a moment of unintentional dark humor while addressing Memphis police officers last Fall, when he went on a rant about how tough "we" are: "The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless, they have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough, they have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore, we are so much more hardcore than they are." It might be easy to picture Miller kicking people while others hold them down, but that is not the same thing as Sheehy's gleeful act of direct violence.
Another recent moment of self-initiated casual violence came not in an explicitly political arena but in the newly politicized environment of higher education. Last month, a professor at The Ohio State University physically attacked a journalist, Mike Newman, for having the temerity to try to ask another question after an interviewee had said that he would take no more questions. According to an excellent rundown of the event in The Times, the documentarian "appeared to be holding recording devices in each of his hands. In a separate video[, the professor] reaches for the device in Mr. Newman’s left hand. Then he uses both of his hands to wrestle Mr. Newman to the ground."
What makes that attack relevant here is that the violence-prone (and honesty-challenged, later claiming that Newman "had laid hands on him") professor in question is part of Ohio State's version of the newest craze on the anti-university right: a civics center. As The Times's report notes: "The state government created the center with the budget that was signed into law in 2023 to 'conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.'" This is, to understate the point, a bad look. It is also fully of a piece with the idea that casual violence against one's enemies is just dandy on the American right, even from those who purport to be scholars.
Should we truly be surprised? Back in 2017, a Republican candidate for Congress in Montana physically attacked a journalist:
Fox News reporter Alicia Acuna, field producer Faith Mangan and photographer Keith Railey witnessed the incident at [Greg] Gianforte’s campaign headquarters in Montana, according to an account published on the Fox News website. After Jacobs asked Gianforte his question, Acuna wrote: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.
“Faith, Keith and I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the man, as he moved on top the reporter and began yelling something to the effect of ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’ … To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.”
Was Gianforte shunned or rejected from politics, either by party leaders or by his red state's voters? Not at all. Indeed, he won that election, won reelection in 2018, then won the state's gubernatorial elections in 2020 and 2024. Moreover, according to the Gianforte Wikipedia page:
On October 18, 2018, during a rally in Missoula, Montana, President Donald Trump congratulated Gianforte for his assault on Jacobs.[136][137][138] While verbally praising Gianforte's prowess in carrying out a body slam, Trump made gestures with his hands and arms to pantomime a fighting maneuver.[139] According to The Guardian, this marked the first time a sitting president had "openly and directly praised a violent act against a journalist on American soil".[140]
Meanwhile, it is worth recalling that Noem's apparent successor as a Trump cabinet secretary, Oklahoma's US Senator-for-now Markwayne Mullin, disrupted a March 2023 hearing for a Senate committee on which he serves by rising from his chair to leave the dais and fight with a witness (a bemused Teamsters official who looked entirely ready to throw down). Bernie Sanders was chairing that hearing, and he managed to stop Mullin from starting a brawl in the hearing room. (Reportedly, "[b]efore going into politics, Mullin had a brief stint as a pro MMA fighter and earned an undefeated 5-0 record." Personally, I'd stil bet on the Teamster from Boston, but whatever.) Whereas Noem allowed FBI agents to attack Senator Padilla, maybe Mullin will strip down to his singlet and go full Hulk on his critics (Hogan, not Incredible).
I described that incident soon after it happened in "Macho Blowhards and a Certain Political Movement," here on Dorf on Law. And the larger point here is that this violence and threats of violence are of a piece with people who think that they are superior to others and that people who disagree with them are inferior beings. In my column yesterday, "Yes, It Truly Is Sociopathic," quoting my own summary from an earlier column, I described how this attitude can lead some people to insist on taking food away from hungry children -- not as an unintended side-effect of some other policy, but as the deal-breaker in a political negotiation: "Other people, in their eyes, are 'lesser,' and it does not matter if the 'people who really matter' do whatever they see fit, no matter if that means ignoring the rules everyone else must live by."
The term "punching down" is usually used metaphorically, as when comedians say that it is not funny to make attempted jokes about someone who is weaker or who has no realistic chance of fighting back. I even feel hesitant when I punch up, as I noted this past December: "I confess that criticizing [Marco] Rubio always feels not only like punching down but also like bullying a kid who is incapable of fighting back. He has all the gravitas of a Mylar balloon with a clown's face on it, and he exudes the seriousness appropriate to a bachelorette party on Bourbon Street." Did the Secretary of State deserve that? Yes, but even so, I went back and forth before including it in the column.
But the macho perma-adolescent boys on the US right have decided that they are not only comfortable bullying weaker people but that they are no longer willing to stick to metaphorical violence. Now-Governor Gianforte was literally punching down on someone he had thrown to the ground. Others have now decided that they too need to get their jollies through violence. Will there be any adults who will bring things back to something resembling a civilized state?
- Neil H. Buchanan