Yesterday an MSNBC viewer tried to murder a group of Republicans while they played baseball in Alexandria, Virginia. Chances are we shouldn't have to remind you about this news story - it's pretty much been a front page topic for every news outlet from here to the Panama Canal.
But sadly, many of the left's leading thought leaders have already forgotten.
Just in case any of them are reading this, let me remind you: a self-proclaimed democratic-socialist, inspired by left wing politicians, media personalities and thought leaders, gave up his small town life in a suburb of St Louis to pursue an assassination attempt on the GOP.
And according to his personal letters and various videos of him at political rallies dating back to 2012, this guy was the poster-boy for leftism. In a video from an Occupy Wall St protest in 2012, the shooter suggested rich people and Republicans were destroying America.
Letters published by a local Belleville newspaper, the hometown of the shooter, reveled James T. Hodgkinson idolized MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow — calling her program “one of my favorite TV shows.”
Rachel Maddow's show, for those who don't know, has a history of using hyperbole and sensationalism to try and paint the GOP as a group of dangerous people who must be stopped. She's been doing this for years - last year she accused former Presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee of openly supporting the murder of gays because they attended a religious liberties conference. She's also compared Republicans to Nazis, the KKK and fascism - three political movements who have completely different principles and ideological stances than mainstream Republicans. She spoon feeds this kind of exaggerated rhetoric to her audience in an attempt to score higher ratings and revenue for her show - and it seems to be working.
But she's not the only silver-tongued leftist to inspire the Alexandria shooter who attempted a killing spree on Republicans this week. Bernie Sanders, one of the shooter's biggest political influences, told leftist-voters just a few days before the shooting that Trump was the most dangerous President in American history [and the GOP Congress who support him are just as bad]. Even before the shooting this statement from Sanders seemed a bit farfetched. Trump is more dangerous than Andrew Jackson who forced the Native Americans onto the Trail of Tears? Or John Tyler who defended slavery? Or FDR who put Japanese immigrants in internment camps? Ironically FDR was another of the Alexandria shooter's political heroes, according to his Facebook page.
Bernie Sanders' exaggerated statement about Trump and the Republicans being too dangerous for America probably seems pretty silly to anyone with a basic understanding of American history. After all, we've seen far worse as a nation that dates back to 1776. But chances are the type of people who riot at Berkley [or shot at Steve Scalise] don't know much about what life was like in America during tougher times.
Sadly, the extremist narrative that folks like Sanders and Maddow are peddling to their followers represents the exact kind of language that inspired an Illinois socialist to move to a Washington DC area YMCA where he plotted his attack on Scalise & associates.
Now Scalise is in critical condition - fighting for his life after a critical operation to remove the bullets form his pelvis. And the nation is still understandably rather shaken up by what happened.
Strangely, just 24-hours after the attack that sent shock waves through DC and the rest of the nation, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, one of Rachel Maddow's co-workers, seems to have completely forgotten about yesterday. Or has he?
The day after the Alexandria attack O'Donnell took to Twitter to compare Donald Trump to Al Capone, an organized crime boss from Chicago who was indirectly responsible for the murder of a countless number of police and civilians during the prohibition era.
They made up a phony story about Al Capone being a gangster & murderer, found zero proof, so they got him on tax evasion. Nice.
He was replaying to a Tweet from the President about the Russia investigation that said...
They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice
Has Lawrence learned nothing from yesterday's shooting? Is he trying to encourage the stupidest in his audience to repeat recent violent behavior? To the casual observer his comment might not have seemed like much. O'Donnell is joking that Trump is a crime boss who needs to be taken down by legal loopholes because they can't get him for a more serious alleged crime.
But imagine dozens of these types of comments stacking up against each other - Kathy Griffin displaying a severed Trump head on her Twitter account, rapper Snoop Dogg shooting a ficticious Republican President in a music video, CNN's Reza Aslan suggesting he'd like GOP Congressman Todd Akin to be raped, Hillary Clinton comparing herself to Wonder Woman trying to stop evil Republicans, NYC's Shakespeare in the Park portraying Julius Caesar as the Republican President being stabbed to death and so many other lesser known but equally vile examples. The list goes on and on.
Now imagine a very simple-minded person with a low IQ and a thin grasp on reality hearing people like Maddow, Clinton, Sanders, O'Donnell, Snoop D-O-Double-G, Aslan and others use these exaggerated statements about dangerous Republicans to insight their audiences. Would a reactionary person who sees themselves as a victim of society be reasonable enough to separate inflated embellishment from actual facts?
It's no wonder domestic terror groups like Antifa - the so-called anti-fascist movement - are now common in every major city in the western half of the free world. Riots and violent outbursts have become the new norm for leftists from these types of groups. They're obsessed with stopping fascism, a word with which they don't even seem to know the definition.
After all the real fascists [the ones from the mid-20th century] were opposed to free speech, favored a one-party system, advocated for collectivism over individualism, wanted a central government to control our economy and thought violence was a necessary means to accomplish these goals. Which American political movement more closely exemplifies that sort of thinking - the left or the right? Sadly, the irony of this is lost on them.
And in their quest to stop imaginary people who don't actually exist, they'll justify violence against almost anyone who's not them. I offer the thousands of social media users who, just yesterday, loudly proclaimed, "This will wake up the Republicans" after the news about Scalise's shooting broke.
Meanwhile, over here on this side of the political spectrum, in response to the news the Republicans didn't violently fight back. They didn't attack anyone and they certainly didn't attempt an assassination on Maddow or Sanders [thank God].
Because that's the difference between our side and theirs - here on the right we don't wish them any harm. We just think they're wrong about public policy.