The attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband is a reminder of the malevolent power of political violence.
On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Sen. Robert Kennedy returned to his Indianapolis hotel after delivering a now-famous speech announcing the dreadful news to a crowd of Black supporters. I was an aide to the presidential hopeful at the time, and in the course of a brief chat, he paused and said, “You know, that fellow Oswald… he set something loose in this country.”
Now we’ve witnessed what was almost certainly an assassination attempt on Speaker Nancy Pelosi amid a brutal attack on her husband in their San Francisco home. 2022 isn’t 1968, but the climate of violence can’t be ignored.
Not all of the violence is political. Some crime rates are spiking after decades of decline, with random attacks on city streets grabbing the headlines; crime has returned to center stage in our politics, and with it, the impulse to find a source that will fit an ideologically useful explanation. Some on the right, like Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, made the remarkable assertion that Paul Pelosi’s assault is tied to “leftist elected officials” creating an atmosphere that fuels crime. The fact that the accused assailant filled social media with conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and Covid-19 was an inconvenient detail.
More importantly, the attack underscores the possible dangers of the escalation of heated political rhetoric, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, from the right.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/29/pelosi-attack-power-political-violence-00064105