A warning should have been heeded at the time of Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler: the era of outdoor political events is coming to an end. Like most, I did not fully grasp it at the time. I thought that the assassination attempt on Trump was a fluke. I thought of it as an attempt by some oddball, who by luck, was able to exploit a failing in Trump’s Secret Service detail. I still dismissed as marginal the impact of Democrats portraying their political adversaries as demonic for so many decades. Up until last week, I gave it no weight. I even chalked it up to a lack of inventiveness on their part, but I was wrong. I realize now that it was a deliberate attempt on their part to incite the feeble-minded toward violence.

Conservatives have not returned the favor in kind. Only in the face of hideous trans medical procedures and abortion have they painted their opponents as demonic. More often, they portray their political adversaries as clowns. One side is granting tacit permission to their followers to view their opponents as Hitler, while the other side is messaging that we should pity those fools. The demonic imagery coming from Democrat leadership has incited homicidal tendencies in their following in a way that the clown imagery coming from conservatives has not. Political violence is now an exclusive feature of the Left.

I was also under the false impression that Trump was acting as a lightning rod, drawing all the venomous hatred of the Left. I was wrong on that count. It turns out that it was just a matter of time before some deluded soul on the Left would take a shot at a softer conservative target. Since Charlie’s death, conservative media personality, Ben Shapiro, has admitted that in retrospect, he was crazy to take the risks that he had in the past. Regrettably, the approachability that was Charlie Kirk’s trademark will be relegated to a past era.

I realize now that politicians and celebrities of the Left were deadly serious in their threats directed at conservatives. They may have pretended that they were the ones being physically threatened, but it was all show, for they knew the Left had a monopoly on political violence. However, that might change. History is replete with examples of leftist violence provoking a reaction from conservative forces, whether intentionally or otherwise.

I am reminded of a passage from the book, Modern Times, by Paul Johnson, about the events that led up to the Spanish Civil War. It reads as follows:

The Left had been the first to desert democracy for violence in 1934. The result was to set up a frenzy of fear in the main democratic right-wing grouping, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), led by Gil Robles. Robles was a genuine republican; he was hated by the monarchists and fascists as much as by the socialists. His party was a mass-movement of the middle class which did not need to use force to obtain what it could obtain through the ballot–security. Yet totalitarian corruption was present in the CEDA too. Its youth movement, the Juventudes de Acción Popular (JAP), responded eagerly to the violence of the Leftist youth organizations. It greeted Robles himself with cries of ‘Jefe, Jefe, Jefe!’ and the slogan ‘The Jefe is always right’. It called the Left ‘anti-Spain’. It proclaimed: ‘Either Acción Popular smashes Marxism or Marxism will destroy Spain. With the Jefe or against the Jefe! There can be no dialogue with anti-Spain. Us and not Them.

This could be our future if the Left does not curtail its proclivity for political violence and the Right does not avail itself of the legal means to dismantle what Stephen Miller describes as “the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

Image generated by ChatGPT.