An opinion piece in the Catholic Herald about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump pointed to the rise in hate speech that has characterised presidential, and other, election campaigns in the US in recent years.
It drew particular attention to the growing use of social media to drive home a political message, and apportion blame when things go wrong. “Loathing and fear in US politics”, the article said, “has been powerfully stimulated by social media in recent years, which amplifies division and excludes users from contrary views in a way that was never previously normal……. The most perilous element of social media discourse is that it encourages a rush to judgment; indeed it is almost designed to encourage an escalation in any argument.”
The article includes a quote from Senator JD Vance, a Catholic convert who has just been announced as Donald Trump’s running mate. Senator Vance, it says, expressed the view of many Republicans when he said: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
But instead of taking this view at face value, the article’s author cautions against any attribution of blame to individuals of either side, and offers us the hope that the attempted assassination “rather than … being an occasion for more divisiveness in US politics … should be a sobering moment to take stock of how and why things came to this pass”.
Read the full story here.