She should have stopped before “but,” but she couldn’t — and her backpedaling wasn’t much better.
Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and one-time presidential contender, found herself under fire this week for comments about the shooting of a health insurance executive that effectively justified cold-blooded murder.
And the weakness of her “clarification” only made it worse.
On Tuesday, Warren made an appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” where she basically told the inflammatory progressive host Joy Reid she understood the Dec. 4 assassination of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street.
And it all started with the “but.”
“Look, we’ll say it over and over,” Warren said, at about the 1:05 mark in the video below. “Violence is never the answer … but you can only push people so far, and then they take matters into their own hands.”
Elizabeth Warren on suspected United Healthcare CEO sho*ter: You can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands.” pic.twitter.com/IxEgI1jEJp
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 11, 2024
The statement wasn’t exactly a glorification of Thompson’s murder along the lines of some on the left, but in many ways it was worse.
It was a cynical, almost clinical, explanation of the shooting — like Warren was saying “of course these things will happen if you push people too far.”
And fortunately, she was slammed for it.
Forbes Media Chairman Steve Forbes said Warren’s comments “show the moral rot of the left.”
‘MORAL ROT OF THE LEFT’: Forbes Media chairman Steve Forbes bashes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for appearing to justify UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder. https://t.co/lk3WyaiGjP pic.twitter.com/lrdcqTwqEq
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 12, 2024
“It’s encouraging vigilantism. It’s encouraging lynching,” Forbes said Wednesday on Fox Business News’ “The Bottom Line.”
“Posters in New York, ‘wanted’ posters for company executives. What is that? That’s an invitation to murder. And these people who put those posters up? She should be also prosecuted. Inciting violence.”
What makes it worse was that Warren had clearly thought out the answer. She gave essentially the same response in an interview with the liberal news outlet HuffPost on Tuesday, when she criticized what she called the “vile practices” of insurance companies.
“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Warren said.
“This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
So, if Americans “post faith in the ability of their government to make change” — the kind of change leftists demand, of course — murders in the streets are only to be expected.
One commenter wrote on social media, “Elizabeth Warren should be impeached and ejected from the U.S. Senate.”
Elizabeth Warren should be impeached and ejected from the US Senate pic.twitter.com/6bqk37AEfG
— PhotographicFloridian (@JackLinFLL) December 11, 2024
That’s not likely to happen.
No senator or congressman has been impeached since the earliest days of the Republic, when Tennessee Sen. William Blount faced a trial but, according to Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute, “the Senate concluded that Senator Blount was not a civil officer subject to impeachment and voted to dismiss the articles because that body lacked jurisdiction over the matter.”
Still, Warren felt the public pressure and issued a statement trying to clear herself.
“Violence is never the answer. Period,” she said in a statement to HuffPost amid the hullabaloo Wednesday.
“I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
The problem for Warren is that she’d already said the opposite — twice.
She might think she didn’t provide a moral justification for the killing, but she did provide an intellectual context for when such a killing would take place.
Was Elizabeth Warren justifying murder?”
Yes: 98% (225 Votes)
No: 2% (5 Votes)
In other words, her disagreement with the assassination was basically a question of tactics for people who have been “pushed too far.”
But the reality is, resorting to violence — deadly violence — is a standard response to the left in American politics and has been for decades — calling it “mostly peaceful,” as the liberal media did for the George Floyd riots, doesn’t change that.
Providing an argument explaining it, as Warren did, won’t fix it either.
The fact is, Warren’s clarification clarified nothing, because her real meaning was clear: Violence is never the answer, but sometimes it is.
She should have stopped before “but,” but she couldn’t. Leftists never can.
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