Trump likely being a psychotic narcissist isn’t the important thing. That doesn’t directly kill people, grotesque as it might be to see Trump pick the occasion of Rob Reiner and his wife’s deaths to remind the world that Reiner was obsessively anti-Trump. The important thing is to avoid even the appearance of blaming murder victims for being murdered. Not because all murder victims are wonderful people but because anything that appears to hand future would-be murderers the tiniest moral excuse puts us all in greater danger, whether from the next Luigi Mangione or the next whining gang member who had a hard childhood.
You’d think Reiner’s son-and-killer purportedly being trans and drug-addicted would give Trump enough fodder to satisfy the blaming urge, but he’s too petty to grab even the lowest-hanging fruit when there’s a chance to grab his own ego instead.
It doesn’t seem as though blaming individuals for their own actions is as high a right-wing priority as it used to be, though. That was the main point of conservatism at its best: pay your own way, take personal responsibility, don’t blame society, don’t blend into the collective, don’t condemn whole tribes based on the actions of a few, etc. That was why conservatism in some forms used to seem roughly compatible with individualism and a legal system based on inviolable individual rights.
Trump’s casual attitude with facts and moral culpability is plainly warping the thinking of many of his right-wing fellow-travelers. If we want to foster a culture in which people use words clearly—and assign moral blame directly to those who abuse others or themselves—it’s not a good idea to toss around vague ideas such as Trump’s claim that fentanyl is a “weapon of mass destruction,” as if simply applying that bureaucratic-weasel-language label makes military responses acceptable.
Falling for that rhetorical trick would be to combine the worst aspects of George H.W. Bush, with his theatrical warnings that crack baggies were being sold near the White House, and George W. Bush, with his err-on-the-side-of-invasion attitude toward Iraqi arms. Trump’s the populist who was supposed to stop the right from casually dreaming of global militarism and social engineering.
David Marcus is one of several conservative writers who appear willing to deform normal moral intuitions to make them jibe with Trump’s latest nonsense, reacting to Trump’s ill-timed Reiner swipe with the ultimate Zen-like empty moral dismissal of our era: “it is what it is.” Marcus has written things more dismissive of individual moral responsibility, though, jumping on the anti-Vivek Ramaswamy bandwagon when that relatively sane and relatively libertarian 2026 candidate for Ohio governor rightly said that native-born Americans may need to study harder if they want to avoid being outcompeted for jobs by immigrants.
Marcus, who like most conservatives is usually quick to condemn lax study habits, bad schools, and people who cast blame instead of competing in the marketplace, turned on a dime and whined at column-length about how shocking and hurtful it is to see Ramaswamy criticizing our beloved native-born workers. What coddling nonsense, nonsense of a kind conservatives would never accept if it came from, say, some labor union activist claiming layoffs should never happen. Toughen up. This kind of indiscriminate blame-shifting leads to winking at poor kids’ shoplifting and unfulfilled urbanites’ cheating on their spouses.
There are other, more conventionally left-liberal forms of blame-shifting active in the past few days too, of course. Even now, there are maniacs who see something like the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia and begin formulating their “But look at the body count in Gaza” responses, as if the shooters were doing careful moral calculus and bringing perpetrators to justice when they gunned down children and a rabbi.
As my old school Brown University recovers from a near-simultaneous shooting there, the layers of blame-shifting get considerably more complicated. It’s hard to analyze the layers without sounding as if one is contributing to the problem of ill-timed or misplaced blame, but let’s give it a try.
First, as I type there are some rumors that the gunman who killed two at Brown shouted “Allahu Akbar,” which wouldn’t be too surprising, but the Brown community makes that point more difficult to evaluate when multiple witnesses or commentators use artfully-evasive language like “shouted a distinctive phrase” instead (perhaps) of risking offending Muslims.
Add to that liberal-obfuscatory problem the weird lack of clear photos of the perpetrator despite the Brown campus having something like a thousand security cameras and Providence beyond campus having countless additional Flock surveillance cameras, not to mention at least one local store owner who says he gave police clear footage of the perp that they haven’t used. Then add the complicating fact that Brown students or self-appointed spokespeople tend to be bright and politicized and to arrive on the scene of any disaster with a readymade narrative and political agenda of their own.
Take 20-year-old Brown student Zoe Weissman, who blames guns being legal and now laments that she’s lived through two school shootings, having earlier been a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting that also launched survivor David Hogg onto the political scene and briefly vaulted the young man to a leadership position in the Democratic National Committee. (Given Brown’s politics, being a Parkland survivor may well have increased Weissman’s chances of being accepted, so in some sense she’s fulfilling her long-term mission now, not that I blame her.)
Weissman told The Providence Journal, “I think that the policymakers need to be ashamed that they’ve let this happen to the point where someone like myself can go through this twice... And I think that if they actually care about their constituents, they’ll show that by passing comprehensive gun violence prevention legislation, and if they don’t, I refuse to believe that they actually care about the people they were elected to serve… This is something I’ve been living with every day for the past seven to eight years... Because I’ve been in therapy, I know how to cope with this. And so, I feel privileged that I’m in a position where I can help [my peers] learn how to cope with it the way I have.”
One’s heart goes out, but trying to disarm a populace just produces more “gun-free zones” full of near-defenseless “soft targets.” After all the criticisms I’ve lobbed at Brown over the years, one of the nicest things I can say about them now is that I do not want them—or anyone—to seem like soft targets in the eyes of the real villains in this world.
Blame killers. Not the guns, which can be and are used by good people to defend themselves. Don’t blame the Australian Jewish beachgoers. Don’t blame peaceful Australian gunowners, whose prime minister now threatens to disarm them even as they see the kinds of bloody attacks they may have to fend off from time to time. Don’t blame the College Republican Club vice president, who seems likely to have been the main target at Brown, though at least one student besides her died. And don’t blame Charlie Kirk for pissing people off before he was shot.
Blame evil, defend victims. Life’s not always that dirt simple, but it’s a lot simpler than some people would like to make it.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
