Not to beat a dead donkey, but the left can claim that Trump engaged in political targeting until the blue cows come home. Two inconvenient truths literally trump TRUMP.
Democrats started it under Obama, then juiced it under Biden. They spied on and Targeted presidential campaigns, then presidents, and everyone else even remotely adjacent.
No one even remotely affiliated with Trump or supporting him has tried to assassinate anyone, succeeded, or celebrated the success.
Sarah Palin got pilloried for a campaign map with a reticle on it, while Luigi Manginoe has a cult following, and celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is a prerequisite for the average progressive activist’s resume.
The right has internet loudmouths and people who fantasize about putting pedophiles in woodchippers, but they aren’t wishing death on average Americans who have differing opinions. Nor do they have signs in front of their homes saying things like No place for hate or love lives here.
If I had to guess, the Venn diagram of people who would cheer if Trump were assassinated, and those whose lawns bear “Hate Has No Home Here” signs, is pretty close to a circle.
All this is unspeakably dangerous, of course.
You can’t have a democracy without civil society, and you can’t have a civil society in which one large chunk of it is salivating at the prospect of murdering the other.
But that’s what we see today, with much of “mainstream” culture egging it on.
And it’s not just that this language is ugly and divisive: Democrats are actively promoting violence with this heated rhetoric.
They are creating — deliberately, I think — a climate in which unstable people are encouraged to commit acts of violence against their political enemies, without leaving obvious fingerprints.
Um. Yes! All the ‘tans-shooters,’ the attacks on Federal agents and ICE facilities, ANTIFA’s entire remit in America is intimidation, fear, and chaos. The Left’s rhetoric is inherently violent because progressive politics requires activist street violence to secure and hold ground, and anti-police and anti-law-and-order policies to give them room to destroy.
Putting bulletproof glass on my office windows is an idea that has occurred to me, and I do need new windows.
And to be fair, there are a lot of voices on the center-right who argue that’s the problem. We’re too polite. But there’s a reason, and it may be our undoing. We believe America is a land of laws meant to be constrained by a Constitution. If we put a sign in our yard outlining what we believe, we’d feel compelled to live up to that, and to call out anyone who didn’t.
The left has none of that. They don’t care about rights or liberties of human flourishing; they care about making others pay for things that matter to them, one of which is controlling you and me. Lying is required and peddling violent rhetoric while claiming love trumps hate implies a love for big government at the expense of all else, even if the homeowner didn’t read the fine print.
They are allowed to hate you because you represent the things their political leaders describe as whatever it will take to earn and keep their support.
The only affordability in our future is a result of Trump’s moves to date and any he may manage while everyone the left chooses to connect to him is politically targeted. Perhaps by unstable people encouraged toward acts of violence against the left’s political enemies.
And the message isn’t that it’s okay to target political opponents; it’s that the Left can and will target anyone who dares to challenge them. Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death wasn’t about Charlie at all. It was a warning that you might be next and that the people supporting the progressive matrix could fire at will.
