Palin unquestionably deserves blame for one thing: she refused to tone down her rhetoric even after the Tucson massacre. In the days after the shooting, many cited Palin’s violent rhetoric and her crosshairs image over Giffords’s district. Palin called this “a blood libel that serves only to incite… hatred and violence”—a bizarre invocation of the anti-Semitic “blood libel” alleging that Jews consumed the blood of Christian children.
Six months later, she was back to her violent talk. “Now is not the time to retreat,” she told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “it’s the time to reload.” Eleven months after that, she told a gathering of conservatives in Las Vegas: “Don’t retreat—reload and re-fight.”
Palin and others like her had introduced a new relationship between the Republican Party and political violence. With the rise of the Tea Party, elected officials in the Republican Party chose to fan the antigovernment rage. They tried to ride the tiger, harnessing the energy of the anti-Obama rebellion. In the end, the antigovernment rage wound up consuming the Republicans and turning the GOP into an antigovernment party with an often violent audience.
By historical standards, twenty-first-century political violence hasn’t been particularly lethal. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,384 lynchings by white supremacists between 1877 and 1950. Some 750,000 died in the Civil War. There was Black nationalist, revolutionary leftist, and Puerto Rican nationalist violence in the 1960s and 1970s, and, later, jihadist terrorism.
What made this moment different was that, on the airwaves and online, right-wing personalities recklessly fed their audiences paranoid conspiracy theories about the Obama administration that made them fear for their country, and their lives. With Republican leaders also validating those fears, it became a recipe for rage and, inevitably, violence.
The militia movement of the 1990s, which faded after the Oklahoma City bombing, and was quiet during the Bush presidency, came roaring back. In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the number of antigovernment “Patriot” groups rose to 512 from 149 the year before, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, with the number of paramilitary groups tripling. By the end of 2012, such Patriot groups had grown to 1,360, SPLC reported.
Then, in 2013 and 2014, something interesting happened: the number of violent groups began to decline. But this wasn’t good news. They had migrated to online organizations such as Stormfront. And, the SPLC reported: “The highly successful infiltration into the political mainstream of many radical-right ideas about Muslims, immigrants, black people and others have stolen much of the fire of the extremists, as more prominent figures co-opt these parts of their program [A] wide variety of hard-right ideas, racial resentments and demonizing conspiracy theories have deeply penetrated the political mainstream, infecting politicians and pundits alike.”