Donald Trump Jr. thinks anyone in the media who says that political violence is going both ways should be “thrown off the air.”
While speaking on Fox News, Trump Jr. slammed those who said political violence has been a two-way street in America in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Wednesday. The president’s son instead suggested that all the violence is coming from the Democratic Party.
“It is not going both ways,” Trump Jr. said. “It is going one way. It is coming from those aligned with the Democrat Party. The hate has been fomented by those in the Democrat Party and you could probably play hundreds of hours of those clips. It is coming from the media – some of them are doing a quick course correction and probably scrub their social media feeds for all the things they’ve said about Charlie, myself, my father for the last few years.”
He continued: “You can’t call someone who you disagree with, or simply can’t win an argument with, a Nazi, a fascist, a dictator, a ‘Greatest threat to democracy in the history of civilization’ and then pretend you had nothing to do with it when the more radical wing – and there does not seem to be that much difference to me these days – takes up arms and tries to kill those they disagree with. It’s not both ways, it’s simply one way and anyone who is saying otherwise should be thrown off the air.”
Trump Jr.’s wishes have already played out a bit. After news of Kirk’s shooting broke, MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd made comments about the divisive political activist – “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which ultimately lead to hateful actions” – that later got him fired from the network.
“You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place,” he said on the air.
On Friday, Dowd responded to his firing on his Substack, where he blamed the “right wing media mob” for misconstruing his words that led to MSNBC reacting to that mob.
“I said that Kirk has been a very divisive and polarizing figure. I then added that we are in a toxic time in America, unlike every other democracy in the world, where we have a combination of divisiveness and near unlimited access to guns. The effort by Holocaust survivors to remind folks of Germany in the 1930s #ItStartedWithWords came to my mind and I said my now legendary line, ‘Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which ultimately lead to hateful actions,’” Dowd wrote. “I thought to myself, how could anyone disagree with this. I guess I was naive.”
The political beliefs of Kirk’s suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, have not been made clear to the public just yet.
