Calling a political opponent a communist is silly. Not even the Soviet Union or China called themselves communist. They called themselves socialist. Communism is when the productive surplus is controlled by the workers themselves. The government owning a business and deciding what to do with a surplus is just a government elite controlling the surplus instead of an owner or manager elite. Communism would be not a government elite or capitalist elite controlling the surplus, but the workers controlling the surplus. The socialist governments were supposed to be a transition phase to true communism. The closest things to this might be cooperatives where the workers also own the business, although those are done within a larger capitalist system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUXucPRH_-4
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw
Elon Musk appears to be calling for violence in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJl-IrEQaw
They’re Using Charlie Kirk’s Death To Make Things Worse…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coojCF9KiWo
“The responsibility for Kirk’s killing, as in basically all acts of political violence, does not flow “directly” from political rhetoric, no matter how vile, but rather from the finger of the sniper; motives and mental state to hopefully be determined later. And all of Trump’s cited examples of violence were left-wingers targeting either conservatives or businessmen or law enforcement; nothing about the assassination this June of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D–Brooklyn Park), no word about the 2022 skull-fracturing home-invasion hammer-attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul (which Trump has serially joked about); and certainly full radio silence on the multiple assaults on law enforcement committed by Trump’s own supporters on January 6, 2021.
…
“The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk wrote. Fox host Jesse Watters on Wednesday asserted that, “They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?” Self-described “Libertarian, GMU Econ, Writer and Think Tanker” Simon Laird declared, “I’m done with de-escalation. I’m done with compromise,” adding: “Killing a few dozen Federal judges and New York Times journalists would have an effect. I’m not calling for violence at this time, but I’m done with the idea that violence is not an option on the negotiation table.”
The above is people on the right hypocritically and falsely claiming that “the left” was responsible for this murder while implying that further murders against people who had nothing to do with Kirk’s death would be justified.
https://reason.com/2025/09/11/what-if-we-acted-like-political-violence-was-a-problem/
Prominent people on the right are using this horrible murder to falsely blame Democrats and the entire left. They falsely claim all of the right is under attack, subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, encouraging more violence. While, of course, ignoring the times people on the left are attacked and murdered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itinwnMA8DQ
Republicans like Vance and Trump use populist and pro-worker rhetoric, but their policy is pro-business and helps the wealthy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJgWsj7Qhw
“Asserting that Biden’s bullseye comment had anything to do with political violence is obviously ridiculous. Moreover, Republicans know that it is ridiculous. In fact, they rightly criticized The New York Times and other media outlets for embracing the preposterous idea that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was morally responsible for the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords. The accusation against her was remarkably similar: The media seized on a map, circulated by her political action committee, that placed target crosshairs over Giffords’ district. There is no evidence whatsoever that Giffords’ shooter ever saw the map or that he was influenced by Republican rhetoric or even motivated by conservative ideas at all.
It is absolutely fair to call out the double standard. It’s true mainstream media wholly embraced the idea that Republicans are to blame for political violence because of things like the crosshairs on the map but said nothing critical about Biden’s bullseye comment. But Republicans like Vance aren’t calling out that double standard—they are participating in it. They are doing the same thing from the other side: blaming political violence on Democratic rhetoric.
It’s true that both parties, their activists, and their acolytes in the media could all benefit the country if they turned down the overheated rhetoric. Routine accusations that such-and-such political leader is a fascist, or Hitler, or a communist, or a dictator are not making things better for anyone. But words do not have some hypnotic power to induce others to commit violence. As always, when a deranged person takes up a gun and attacks someone, we should blame that individual—not other people’s words.”
https://reason.com/2024/07/15/stop-blaming-the-attempted-assassination-on-heated-anti-trump-rhetoric/
“As both recent and more distant history has made evident, the ways that lawmakers talk about China has huge effects. Broadly labeling China an enemy can lead to needless marginalization, violence, and even death.
“I think the biggest advice is to not have anything that was sweeping. We’re asking folks to watch their tone, tenor, and nuance in their approach to China,” said chief of staff for the Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen initiative Caroline Chang. Staying away from broad terms and talking about the government or specific leaders, such as President Xi Jinping, is a start.”
“In a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this past weekend, President Donald Trump used the term “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus, one of several racist statements he made during a wide-ranging speech that touched on his administration’s handling of the pandemic.
“By the way, it’s a disease, without question, [that] has more names than any disease in history,” Trump said at the time. “I can name kung flu, I can name 19 different versions of names.”
Since then, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has gone on to defend his use of the term. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been noncommittal: When asked how he and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, felt about Trump’s remarks, McConnell declined to say whether he was comfortable with the president’s rhetoric, instead suggesting that the question should be directed to Chao, who immigrated from Taiwan to the US as a child.
McEnany’s defense of Trump is the same flimsy one he’s been using ever since he began calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus:” She argued that such names simply associate the illness with its “place of origin,” an effort that even if conducted in good faith goes against World Health Organization guidelines that warn against promoting labels that could stigmatize an entire region.
“The president does not believe it’s offensive to note that the virus came from China,” McEnany said during a briefing on Monday.”
…
“Trump’s decision to lean into racist rhetoric — including terminology his own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has condemned in the past — comes as Asian Americans continue to report hate incidents such as verbal abuse, physical assault, and property damage during the pandemic. As the coronavirus spread around the world, tropes that treat Asians as perpetual foreigners have also resurfaced, fueling racist and hostile anti-Asian sentiment.
Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s been tracking self-reported hostile anti-Asian incidents since late March, says it’s received more than 2,100 reports since the project began. Such incidents have included instances of employees getting shunned in the workplace, families being spat on at fast food restaurants, and children getting beaten up by their classmates. The group says it saw a surge in reports after Trump began using rhetoric like the “Chinese virus” and noted that many “anti-China” comments were frequently associated with verbal and physical assaults.
“A White male walked by me and said, ‘you f—king Chinese spread the Coronavirus to this country, you should all leave this country!’” one incident report read.
“A woman sitting at a bus stop was screaming at myself and other Asians that she saw walking,” read another. “She said that we were ‘dirty Chinese,’ that we were trying to take over the US.”
Researchers, too, emphasize that Trump’s rhetoric has mattered in the past: An NBC News report by Kimmy Yam points to a February study, which determined that Trump’s racist comments against Latino Americans “emboldened” others who held similar views to express them.
Trump’s continued use of racist statements about the coronavirus — ultimately trying to deflect blame by pointing out it is foreign-born — comes as he struggles to deal with the fallout of his own handling of the pandemic: Most recently he came under fire for saying he intends to slow down coronavirus testing because doing so would reveal the presence of fewer cases.
“President Trump continues to utilize white supremacist and nationalist views as a means of scapegoating his failures for political gain,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, in a statement. “Unless we hold him accountable, the discrimination and harassment against Asian Americans will become deeply entrenched, cause unimaginable harm and suffering, and take decades to unwind.””