You don’t remember that last part, because it never happened. Similarly, nothing like that happened in June of this year, when a would-be assassin turned himself in near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As he was being charged with attempted murder, no one flipped over to Fox News to find a litany of pundits blaming every liberal in America who had vented about the Court and its constitutionalist justices.
When Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was brutally attacked by a neighbor five years ago, the suspect said it was over tree clippings. Paul and his wife Kelley pointed to the neighbor’s hate-filled Facebook screeds against President Donald Trump as evidence of a politically motivated attack. But did they use that as a springboard to blame legions of other people for one person’s crime?
They did not. Because this seems to travel in only one direction these days. There are acts of ideologically fueled violence that can be found across the spectrum. But the weaponization of those events as a vendetta against political opponents? That’s from the playbook of the Left.
In the horrible hammer attack on Paul Pelosi last week, we don’t even have a firm grasp on the suspect’s political motivation. A denizen of the Berkeley art crowd a decade ago, the suspect’s fancy had recently turned to various types of QAnon garbage, peppered with helpings of anti-Semitism. Growing evidence of dysfunctionality, fueled by mental illness, makes it even harder to place him into any coherent political orbit.
That has not restrained a wide chorus of liberals from metaphorically placing hammers in the hands of Republican candidates and voters. In this tense home stretch, as we inch closer toward next week’s midterms, any campaign ad that singles out Nancy Pelosi for removal from the House speaker’s chair is suddenly offered as evidence of complicity in violence against her husband. Even in these times of routine excess, it has been remarkable to listen to people who have called half of America racist and fascist now lecturing others about their tone of discourse. Democrats have likened Donald Trump to Hitler for seven years, and suddenly the slightest barb against Pelosi is an invitation to violence?
It would be easy to chalk up this silly festival to desperation, in advance of what is shaping up to be a very bad election for Democrats. Unable to get traction on inflation, crime, and other issues voters actually care about, they may see strategic value in warning that this expected Republican wave is encouragement for more partisan violence. It matters not one bit that every Republican interview segment contains a condemnation of the Pelosi attack.
But Democrats cannot be blamed for thinking this ploy would work. They have spent more than a year asserting that Trump is responsible for hundreds of rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was not enough to differ with his election suspicions or criticize the style of his rhetoric; they had to invent an actual charge of incitement, a crime for which there is no evidence.
But since the January 6th Committee enjoyed a predictable chorus of praise from the media culture, it must be tempting to roll out another smear campaign as this election approaches, ascribing a taste for political violence to anyone who dares to harbor doubts about the 2020 result. The so-called “election deniers” have tasted media mockery for two years; why not ramp things up and demonize an entire landscape of candidates and their millions of followers as a threat to a peaceful republic? We may have found the only type of crime Democrats are enthused about stamping out—the imagined future offenses of people who don’t vote for them.
These opportunistic alarm bells may work, or they may backfire. But their sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty are likely to fill the air until votes are being counted on November 8. As these final pre-election days pass, two valuable lessons are worth bearing in mind.
First, obviously, it is always wrong to ramp up political passions to the point of violence.
Second, when such acts occur, we should rediscover the concept of personal responsibility. Attacks on Brett Kavanaugh, Rand Paul, and a baseball field full of Republicans were viewed as isolated incidents rather than the agenda of an entire political party. Paul Pelosi’s attacker is a deranged criminal driven by demons yet to be discerned. It is contemptible to use him to smear the motives of countless Republican candidates and voters.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
