Don’t turn the rhetoric down

If a person poses an existential threat to the planet, it’s OK to say that. In fact, it’s our responsibility to.

Source: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

Before Saturday, the last president shot in the head was Quinto Inuma Alvarado. 

The apu, or leader, of the indigenous Kichwa community Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu in the northern Peruvian Amazon, Quinto Inuma was assassinated in cold blood this past November while traveling home from an environmental conference. A group of hooded assailants ambushed his boat and shot him three times in the back and once in the head, while several members of his family were on board.

Quinto Inuma had dedicated his life to forcefully speaking out against illegal logging and drug trafficking in his community. He’d received myriad threats to his life because of his advocacy—and was killed despite a government-issued order to protect him. (One of the gunmen confessed to carrying out the murder for $265.)

Quinto Inuma was one of at least 126 human rights and environmental activists assassinated in Latin America in 2023. His murder adds to a trend of deadly politically-motivated violence against outspoken environmental defenders across the Global South.

I’m thinking of Quinto Inuma today—and all the 1,910 activists murdered from 2012 to 2022 for daring to speak loudly against polluters and their enablers—as I hear the emerging Republican argument that progressives must “turn the rhetoric down” against Trump following a 20-year-old gunman’s failed attempted to kill him.

That argument picked up steam after Republican Congressman J.D. Vance—Trump’s just-named vice presidential pick—tweeted that anti-Trump language "led directly to Trump's attempted assassination." It’s now spread all the way to Canada, where Alberta Premiere Danielle Smith is calling for people to stop using words like “dangerous” to describe her party’s political beliefs.

Anyone who cares about preserving a livable planet must reject this argument forcefully. Not only is it baseless—no one actually knows what motivated the young Republican who shot Trump—it is a blatant attempt to silence legitimate criticism.

The fact is, conservative politics are currently dangerous. Their ideology rests on denying a crisis that has already killed millions, and that is expected to kill many millions more as it worsens. Electing Trump to the presidency in the U.S. would add an additional 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere compared to Biden—an amount which would permanently push the world past the catastrophic 1.5 Celsius threshold. That’s objectively dangerous.

Across the world, particularly in the Global South, three environmental defenders are killed every week for trying to speak out against similar existential threats. In the United States, we have the privilege of being able to speak out with relatively little risk. To mute ourselves in the name of “preventing political violence” is an insult to those victims, and a slap in the face to the environmental defenders who live every day with a type of risk that Trump could never dream of. 

It sucks that Trump got shot in the ear. He’s still an existential threat to the planet. If you hear and think, “I should kill him,” perhaps seek help. When a person poses an existential threat to democracy and the planet, the solution is not to shoot them. The solution is to deny them power—which in a functioning democracy, we do through speaking out.

Further reading:

• Environment defenders face new wave of oppression

• The murders of Indigenous activists mark the death of the planet

• Alleged murderers of Quinto Inuma get 8 months of pretrial detention

• What the Republicans blaming Democrats for Trump’s shooting are really up to

• The only kind of “political violence” all U.S. politicians oppose

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