Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were brutally murdered in their homes early Saturday morning. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also shot and seriously wounded in their homes and are both currently hospitalized.
It would soon be revealed that the suspect in these shootings was an anti-abortion, Trump-supporting, evangelical Republican who also had eleven other Democratic officials on a list of intended targets.
It is the kind of heinous violation of humanity that should have generated bipartisan outrage and condemnation; an act of violence that disgusted all decent human beings.
The problem is, the MAGA movement is inherently indecent.
In the hours following the shootings, social media soon filled with Trump supporters’ attempts to somehow paint the assassin as a Democrat, despite a clear body of evidence of his party affiliation, religious beliefs, voting history, and motivation. As of this writing, they are refusing to take down their posts, with many doubling down on the spin efforts. Republican lawmakers have chosen to add to the online firestorm by using their platforms to amplify disinformation, or in the case of Utah Senator Mike Lee, poke fun at the carnage.
This is what this movement has cultivated, what it nurtures, what it perpetuates.
MAGAs are so morally broken that they can't even bring themselves to condemn the shootings of Democratic politicians in their homes, violations of safety and security, which have left two children orphaned, two families devastated, and an entire community reeling. They would rather push a baseless and destructive false narrative than simply be decent human beings.
Despite the lion’s share of Trump supporters claiming Christianity, in practice, they lack a shred of empathy, not a single impulse to love their non-Republican neighbor, no ability to choose decency over political ideology. They are mortally allergic to the ways and teachings of Jesus.
This shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. To have spent a decade embracing someone as devoid of nobility and goodness as their foul-mouthed cult leader obviously means there isn’t much of a working moral compass left. You don’t rubber stamp a platform of contempt against immigrants, subjugation of women, and hostility to the sick and poor unless there’s a profound heart sickness present.
Still, in moments of such breathtaking and senseless violence as has been visited upon Minnesota, you’d hope that every human being, regardless of their political affiliations or religious beliefs, would reach across the lines of tribalism and allow their humanity to come to bear. It has always been possible pre-2016.
But the grim reality is that MAGA Americans are either unwilling or unable to set aside their cultic fervor and to participate in a just and compassionate society, because that kind of goodness is incompatible with the Trump ethos; one that rewards cruelty, celebrates violence, and refuses to look in the mirror in times when one of their own commits an unspeakable act.
I don’t know how we move forward as a nation when a sizable portion of it is this bereft of even the most basic and elemental human responses to sickening disregard for human life.
All I know is that we who are not a part of the death cult of Trump can never allow blind hatred to leave us as callous toward human beings across the expanses of political and religious ideology as those who are a part of it seem to be. We can’t become so entrenched in the narrative of our own righteousness and the evil across from us that we can’t simply grieve life when it is taken, regardless of the qualifiers attached to that life. The day we do that, all is surely lost.
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