Frank Bruni: Bret, after the heartache and fury of the past week, it’s good to be here with you, a friend — and, more to the point, a friend whose courtesy and sincerity don’t waver even when our views diverge.
Bret Stephens: As our friend and colleague Roger Cohen likes to say: mutual.
Frank: I suspect I’m a proxy for many millions of Americans when I say how much I’d like you to assure me — to persuade me — that I shouldn’t feel as anxious and scared as I do, that I’m suffering some liberal overreaction when I hear these pledges from President Trump, from Vice President JD Vance, from (who else?) Stephen Miller, to prosecute and punish groups on the left that they’ve painted as sponsors of political violence. This feels to me like the latest opportunistic lurch toward the authoritarianism that the president and his minions really do want in America.
Bret: It’s not only scary, it’s gross. They’re wasting no time turning the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s assassination into a political project.
Frank: Hell of a way to honor someone you revered.
Bret: Look, I do think this is an occasion for some quiet introspection on the part of the political left that has spent a decade treating Trump supporters as wannabe fascists. Speech, of course, isn’t violence, but there’s too much overheated rhetoric coming from the side of the political divide that likes to think of itself as the tolerant, nicer group of people.
That said, I don’t think my saying this carries much weight. Liberals don’t need a conservative like me to hector them. It should be up to people on the left to try to bring down the rhetorical temperature on their own side, just as it should be up to those of us on the right to do the same for our side. Right now, that’s not happening.
Frank: You will get no pushback from me on the smug moral superiority of far too many liberals. No pushback against the call for people on the left to own up to their use of inflammatory language. But I will challenge the intensity and lopsided nature of the focus on the left. It diminishes attention to the president’s language, which easily rivals what he’s railing against. And Trump, I repeat, is the president. Also, we can chicken-and-egg this thing until the cows come home.
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