Laura Hollis went liberal-hating again in her Sept. 13 WorldNetDaily column, written in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk, insisting that he was killed because he “had the courage to tell the truth.”
Charlie’s murder is just the latest example in a long litany of horrific examples that explain why America is so polarized. And it comes down to this:
The division in America is, at its core, between those who want the truth – want to know it and want to be able to say it – and those who believe that with power comes the right to decide what the truth is, and to substitute a “narrative,” if that suits their purposes.
America is polarized because Americans have been betrayed and manipulated and exploited and lied to by the most important cultural institutions we have – government, the medical profession, the justice system, the educational system, the media, the entertainment industry.
Hollis’ chief examples, however, are right-wing COVID and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories:
– We were lied to about the origins of COVID-19. We were lied to about our government’s role in funding the gain-of-function research that made a virus like COVID-19 possible.
– We were lied to about the safety of the mRNA shots, which were never vaccines.
– We were lied to about who was at greatest risk from contracting COVID-19. We were lied to about the actual immunity that came with contracting the virus versus taking shot after shot after shot.
– We were manipulated and forced by the government, employers and educational institutions into taking those injections, shutting down our businesses, closing our schools and masking our children. We were lied to about the real dangers that the mRNA shots posed to young people and pregnant women. We are still trying to discover the health risks of those shots and to calculate the economic and educational losses caused by those decisions.
– In fact, it now appears that we’ve not been told the truth about the safety of the childhood vaccines generally – at least with the current scheduled amount of them.
Then there was this example:
– We have watched as the death of a drug addict is celebrated with thousands of news articles, elaborate funerals, a gold casket and weeping politicians, but an innocent young Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by a repeat felon on public transit doesn’t even warrant a single story. (And when she does get news coverage, her death is downplayed by the legacy media as just clickbait for conservatives.)
That’s an apparent reference to George Floyd, whose humanity Hollis is trying to deny by dismissing him as a nothing but a “drug addict” instead of a man who was needlessly killed by police. She also lied that the death of Iryna Zarutska “doesn’t even warrant a single story” — WND published numerous articles about it, thus proving that it was, in fact, “clickbait for conservatives.” She also didn’t mention that the reason it was clickbait was because the perpetrator was a scary black man and gave those conservatives an excuse to race-bait.
Hollis continued to unironically write:
America is polarized because the people and institutions we should be able to trust lie to us as a matter of course for their own benefit, and because anyone who tries to get to the truth and bring it to the attention of the public – in fact, anyone with an opinion that runs counter to that of the elites is this country – is denounced as a conspiracy theorist, a kook, a threat to “our democracy,” to “public health” and to some people’s very existence.
That inflammatory rhetoric is completely detached from reality and encourages violence. We are seeing it. Every. Single. Day. And yet, even when confronted with the consequences of their exaggerations and lies, those who create and amplify them don’t backpedal, they don’t apologize, they don’t reconsider.
They double down. They blame the victim. They gaslight us harder.
That’s why America is so polarized. That’s why social media is filled with posts proclaiming that conservatives and Trump supporters deserve to die. And I won’t be surprised if it turns out that that’s why Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.
Hollis, of course, is silent about the fact that President Trump and his fellow conservatives lie to us as a matter of course for their own benefit, and when caught double down, blame the victim, and gaslight us harder.
Hollis served up more of the same in her Sept. 20 column:
But if Kirk’s assassination cast a pall of grief over millions of Americans, reactions from the Left have shocked and outraged them. Immediately following the shooting and announcement of Kirk’s death, social media sites like X, Bluesky and TikTok were filled with posts and videos from thousands of people cheering Kirk’s death, calling him vicious names (“Nazi b*tch,” “fascist,” “racist,” “transphobe,” “misogynist”), stating that he deserved to die, dissing his wife and children, and even calling for similar violence against other conservatives.
Those who proudly posted their indifference or outright joy at Kirk’s murder were expecting the usual cheers and praise for their left-wing virtue signaling, but the reaction has been quite different. Incensed by this appalling callousness, Americans began calling employers and demanding that action be taken. It’s difficult to know the numbers, but hundreds of employers have been contacted and dozens of people, including well-known personalities like MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd and perennially unfunny comedian Jimmy Kimmel, have been fired for their hateful comments or for spreading lies. (Kimmel just got his show pulled by Disney after asserting that Kirk’s killer was a MAGA conservative. He was not.)
Americans are just as shocked by the sources of these inflammatory and inhumane statements as they are by the content; a disproportionate number of the posters are teachers, professors, administrators and medical professionals; those people educate children and provide medical care, and they state publicly that someone with different political views was a terrible person who deserved to die?
But didn’t Hollis just effectively claim that George Floyd was “a terrible person who deserved to die” by dismissing him as nothing but a “drug addict”?
Hollis then tried inciting her fellow right-wingers to violence while also trying to blame that incitement on the left:
Millions of ordinary conservative Americans – not activists, politicians, podcasters or social media influencers – hold views very similar to Kirk’s. They have tolerated smears, doxxing, demonization and violence for years, and THEY. ARE. DONE. Recent events make it appear that the Left is being held captive by lunatics, and if you disagree with them, as Kirk did, you can be murdered in broad daylight, the press will run interference for your killer, and your neighbors, your nurses and your children’s teachers will cheer your death.
People are beginning to understand that being polite, staying out of the fray, trying to be viewed as nonjudgmental has only permitted the situation to grow more extreme.
Even the most apolitical Americans, if pushed to the wall, will fight back. I don’t mean responding in kind (nor have I seen calls for anything like that – although all bets are off if we suffer through any more assassinations of public figures or random murders of innocent bystanders), but I am deeply concerned about a breakdown of order and civility that Americans tend to take for granted.
To avoid further escalation, cooler heads on the Left had better get control of their side of the aisle, and quickly.
Needless to say, Hollis feels no need to get control of her emotions and take responsibility for her incitement.
Hollis used her Sept. 27 column to gush that the memorial service for Kirk as “truly something to behold” and filled with “some of the most prominent figures in American politics professing their faith in God, one after another,” then complained that non-right-wingers didn’t rhapsodize about it the same way:
Immediately following Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, the left-wing outrage and propaganda machinery went into full gear. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, described conservatives as “slobbering MAGA masses” and Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA as “an empire … built on videos promising sexualized humiliation of liberal women – really, girls – for MAGA men.” The term “Christian nationalist,” launched (largely unsuccessfully) as a slur in the run-up to the November 2024 elections, is now being flung about again, as if being a Christian and wanting to live in a nation whose citizens embrace values like faith in God, sacrifice for one’s family, love of one’s neighbor and forgiveness of one’s enemies is a bad thing; a mortal threat.
[…]As demonstrated by the vile responses cheering Charlie Kirk’s death on social media and the derogatory articles describing his memorial service, there has been no respite, no collective impulse to pause and reflect, no bipartisan efforts to eliminate dangerous and hyperbolic accusations, no unified calls for behavior we once agreed reflected basic human decency.
Hollis didn’t disprove anything Marcotte said about the service. She indicates she will do nothing about her own dangerous and hyperbolic accusations, and she will never admit that her aggressive partisan attacks contribute to the political polarization she claims to abhor.