Today, we love to put labels on everything. We use the labels “right or “left” even though we don’t really know exactly what right and left are. We label people “communist” or “Marxists”  without really knowing what the hell they really mean. As soon as something bad happens today, we need to put a political spin on it to try to make the other party look bad. Both parties play the blame game, but I have to admit that the party that plays it the best has been the Republican Party.

On Sunday, September 28^th, a man identified as Thomas Sanford drove his truck into a Mormon Church in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He drove his pickup into the church during services. He opened fire with an assault rifle, killing two with gunfire. He then set the church ablaze using gasoline, which killed two more. Sanford himself was killed in a shootout with the police outside the church. Immediately after the shooting, I swear, everyone was searching not for answers but for political motives. The man appears to be a Trump supporter, but being a Trump supporter doesn’t mean that all Trump supporters are going to shoot up a Mormon church. In fact, the Mormons, for the most part, are conservative and lean towards the Republican Party. So, we have a Trump supporter perform an act of violence on a group that more than likely were Trump supporters, yet we try to find a political reason for the killing. Could it be that there was no political reason at all and that it was just old-fashioned hate?

Tyler Robinson shot and killed Charlie Kirk. Here again, the Republicans and much of the conservative press tried to find a political motive. There were claims that he was radicalized by going to college. There were claims that he had a political message on the bullet casing. Here was a young man who came from a conservative home and had a conservative upbringing. After Robinson shot Charlie Kirk, much of the media began labeling him as a “left-wing extremist,” even though they had no facts to back up that assumption. The shooter actually had no party affiliation. What was the reason that he shot Kirk? The motive was personal opposition to Kirk. There was no radicalization from attending college; the man was in a 3-year apprenticeship program to become an electrician.

Individuals often carry out modern political violence radicalized online, absorbing a chaotic blend of memes, grievances, and moral forgiveness. Many defy traditional categories, yet the media and political figures rush to assign ideological blame, especially when the violence aligns with their opponents' rhetoric. Trump, at Charlie Kirk's funeral, stated that he “hated his opponent”, still blaming the radical left and the democrats. A leader of any country blaming his opponent when there is absolutely no proof that his opponent had anything to do with the shooting just divides the nation more, and that division weakens this country.

Research shows that right-wing extremist violence is more frequent and deadly than left-wing violence in the US. Figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Donald Trump, and Charlie Kirk have been cited for escalating rhetoric from mockery to incitement. Trump notably urged supporters to “rough up” protesters and later presided over the January 6^th insurrection, which resulted in multiple deaths and injured over 100 police officers. January 6^th was the biggest right-wing attack on a government institution in our history. Glen Beck's chalkboard and Kirk's social media campaigns framed political opposition as existential threats. This style has normalized aggression as a form of patriotism. I fear we will we will have more violence toward politics because the rhetoric has increased and will continue to grow as an effort to divide and weaken our nation even more.

Except for the January 6^th attack on our Capitol, most of the violence can really be labeled as lone wolf actions, in other words, individuals acting alone. There is no training center funded by either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. These individuals are created because of all the anger that is being generated by social media and by the mainstream media. Just because the shooter is wearing a Trump shirt doesn't mean that he was sent by the Republicans. What we need to do is start to examine the message that is causing all of these violent acts. The Democrats didn’t shoot Charlie Kirk, and the media should be responsible enough to report it honestly and in a manner that doesn’t just create more problems and more sensational news.

Research shows right-wing extremist violence is more frequent and more deadly than left-wing violence. Of the politically motivated violent incidents since January 6^th, 2021, 22 were fatal, with most attributed to the far-right assailants. I have a problem with that because it makes it sound like there is an organized effort on the right to attack the left. The problem  I see today is that because of all of the violent rhetoric, we trigger more lone wolf violence. When a so-called person on the right attacks someone, we don’t hear about the rhetoric that led to the violence; we hear a lot about all the mental problems of the person. If a person on the so-called left attacks a person on the right, we will hear about the radicalization of people. What we are doing, and this is mostly by the press, is not reporting it fairly, objectively, and not with anything in mind but sensationalizing the situation until the next situation comes along. This type of reporting divides the nation more.