You don't have to pay attention to people who obviously want to manipulate you
Just ignore them and make the best decisions you can.
The weird Paul Pelosi attack in San Francisco last week brought out an altogether predictable zeitgeist in which Republicans and conservatives were accused of fomenting the deadly political environment in which that sort of violent chaos thrives. Hillary Clinton summed it up best when she wrote on Twitter:
The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.
I suppose this is mostly a case of preaching to the choir, but: You don’t have to pay attention to stuff like this. It’s all nothing more than just desperate politics from desperate people. You needn’t feel cowed or scared by it. You can just ignore it and live your political life as you (hopefully) always have, by making judgment calls based on the best evidence you have before you instead of the greasy crud of busted-ass machine politics.
Here are a few points worth making in response to this insistence that the Right is somehow responsible for the Pelosi thing:
Republicans and conservatives do sometimes truck in “deranged conspiracy theories.” So do liberals and Democrats. Like, all the time. People: Just this month Hillary Clinton herself warned millions and millions of people that “right-wing extremists” are planning to “literally steal the next presidential election.” This is incendiary, hyper-demented rhetoric, the kind of thing guaranteed to make already-unbalanced people even more unbalanced. We saw the same unhinged conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 election, which progressives for years insisted was stolen by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin or whatever. This behavior is not stratified along party lines. It has now become a regular part of American political rhetoric.
I don’t really know what Hillary means when she says “hate.” That concept is nebulous enough to be basically meaningless in this context. But I suppose we can give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was referring to mean-spirited rhetoric and nasty political jabs. Again, this is common stuff, common enough to be effectively unremarkable. Last month Joe Biden referred to “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” and “a threat to this country.” This was so incendiary and indefensible that Biden himself walked it back the next day. Before he did, though, Nancy Pelosi herself praised Biden’s remarks, calling them “inspiring” and “optimistic.” AOC has accused Republicans of wanting to “burn fossil fuels til there’s hell on Earth,” to “turn the United States into a far-right Christian theocracy” and “subvert and dismantle our democracy into a creepy theological order.” Rep. Tim Ryan earlier this year called for the Make America Great Again movement to be “killed and confronted.” Rep. Maxine Waters suggested Trump administration Republicans were such a threat that people should “push back” on them with “crowds” when they were out in public. This is unfortunately just normal stuff, it’s par for the course, everyone does it, it’s silly and stupid to pretend like it’s just one group of people.
I don’t know if many of you were aware of this, but there have been a fair number of real and attempted attacks on conservatives and Republicans in relatively recent years. I mean, a dude in North Dakota ran over an 18-year-old kid last month reportedly because he thought the kid was part of a “Republican extremist” group or something. A left-wing domestic terrorist attempted to assassinate a bunch of Republicans at a congressional baseball game in 2017. Earlier this year a guy was captured near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house where he had traveled with the intent to murder Kavanaugh himself. A spectator nearly stabbed New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin at a campaign event earlier this year. A few years ago Rep. Matt Gaetz was violently assaulted by his former Democratic challenger. Republican Sen. Susan Collins was reportedly targeted with the extremely deadly poison ricin after she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. A Democratic staffer posted online the private addresses of multiple Republican senators during the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, a seriously dangerous move that could have led to significant violence against those senators. I don’t know what to tell you. The list goes on and on.
I should caution that this is not a standard weak-sauce “both sides do it!” kind of appeal. We all know both sides do it, everyone knows that, it’s not new or surprising. Rather, this is just a word of advice that you simply do not have to listen to people who are trying to manipulate you. You can ignore them. When someone says, “Republicans are conservatives are fomenting political violence and they need to dial back their rhetoric!” you can just tune that person out because they’re unserious and motivated entirely by politics and they are not worth listening to, at least on this subject.