In Aug. 2012, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named Floyd Lee Corkins armed himself with a handgun and extra magazines. He drove to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the socially conservative Family Research Council, planning to shoot it up. Corkins, who later cited the Southern Poverty Law Center for the proposition that the FRC is an “anti-gay” organization, was also carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which he hoped to stuff in his dead victims’ mouths. Corkins, who served as a volunteer at a local LGBT community center, was stopped by an unarmed security guard.
In June 2017, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named James Hodgkinson armed himself with a rifle and handgun. He drove to Alexandria, Virginia, in hopes of assassinating the Republican team practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. He severely wounded then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who thankfully survived after receiving multiple blood transfusions and surgeries. Five others were also injured. Hodgkinson was a 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign volunteer who, in a Facebook post three weeks before the shooting, wrote: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
In June 2022, a young Californian named Nicholas Roske flew to the nation’s capital. Roske attained a handgun, zip ties, a tactical knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape and other burglary tools. At 1:38 a.m. local time, about a half-hour after a taxi dropped him off in front of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Chevy Chase, Maryland, home, Roske had second thoughts and called 911. After his arrest, Roske told police he was angered by the leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case. Roske had written in a private chat: “I’m gonna stop Roe v Wade from being overturned.”
In March 2023, Audrey “Aiden” Hale, a transgender individual, slaughtered three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. A former pupil at the Christian school, Hale took precious time during the rampage to divert and unload seven rounds into a stained-glass depiction of the biblical character Adam in a church next door. As this column asked last year: Why, exactly, would a transgender former student of a Christian school return to that school to murder innocent Christian children and shoot up a stained-glass representation of no less symbolic a biblical figure than Adam? We don’t necessarily need Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. Leaked excerpts of the murderer’s manifesto corroborate Hale’s sinister, anti-Christian motive.
This Sunday, former President Donald Trump survived an attempted assassination for the second time in a span of roughly two months. The first would-be assassin, the mysterious Thomas Crooks, donated $15 to ActBlue, the well-known Democratic fundraising platform. The second would-be assassin, the considerably less mysterious Ryan Routh, has a prolific public record. Routh, a convicted felon and supporter of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, had an over-the-top, creepy obsession with Ukraine—one of the defining causes of the contemporary left. Routh’s social media accounts were rife with de rigueur left-wing platitudes about the alleged unprecedented threat posed by Trump to America’s democracy and constitutional order.
Murderous political violence in the United States today is not an all-of-the-above phenomenon. Yes, such violence must be condemned by all responsible political and civic actors, as we inch ever closer to an irrecoverable national abyss. But MSNBC’s daily on-air histrionics to the contrary notwithstanding, all sides are not equally culpable for the terrible situation America finds itself in today.
Trump may not always be the most circumspect rhetorician, but he has never actively called for his supporters to physically assault their political opponents—including on Jan. 6, when he called for his throng of supporters gathered at the Ellipse to “peacefully and patriotically” demonstrate at the Capitol. The same cannot be said for Trump’s opposition, such as when Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said earlier this year on MSNBC that Trump is “unfit,” “destructive to our democracy,” and “has to be eliminated.” According to a poll released on Wednesday, a whopping 28% of Democrats said America would be better off if Trump were assassinated—and another 24% of Democrats confessed uncertainty.
This is unconscionable.
The left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx’s calls for a global revolution of the proletariat—and the French Revolution even before that. And in today’s post-truth world, an expedient narrative often trumps cold facts. But Trump is not a “fascist” or “dictator.” On the contrary, Trump’s first term was, if anything, marred by excessive deference and an unwillingness to fire insubordinate bureaucrats.
If MSNBC talking heads and their left-wing confreres fail to tone down the rhetoric, reasonable observers will conclude they agree with the 28% of Democrats who want Trump dead.
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To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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The people who characterize Trump as a President, who incited an Insurrection on J6, designed to overthrow the US government, are the very same people inciting people to assassinate him. There is nothing peace loving about the elites in power. Hillary Clinton stated what amounts to an admission that if they lose 2024 “we’re all dead”.
What she means is what they all perceive. Trump may use what they were looking for when they raided Mar-a-Lago and did not find. He may use what Epstein used against them. He may use the Ukraine corruption and money laundering, the bribery, the China ties and the treason. He may initiate a purge that affects all the bureaucracies where power has been cemented in place. They know it, we know it and they know that is what the people want.
Why are all the leftist nutjobs responsible for political violence? Easy. When you have convinced yourself that the fate of the world depends on you and that you hold the moral highground on whatever topic about which you care to comment, then anyone who opposed you or fails to kowtow to your expressed opinions is morally defective & an existential threat to right-thinking people and it is imperative that they be silenced by any means necessary. Forget that their opinions are often muddle headed, illogical and, historically, ineffective at best and catastrophic at worse. Any means necessary becomes a reasonable response when the fate of the world rest on your poor slumped shoulders, in your own myopic, narcissistic view