Democrats Are Catching On That Political Violence Can Go Both Ways
Political violence isn’t a one-way street. It has taken Democrats too long to figure that out, and now it’s too late.
From The Federalist by Eddie Scarry
The accomplice media evidently got a new set of instructions from Joe Biden’s people that they need to start hyping up the possibility of violence coming from Republicans ahead of the election.
Democrats may finally have gotten the message that the threat of force isn’t a political tool that only they get to use, which is great news. Now that they’ve realized it, though, they’re trying to convince voters that it’s only a real problem when their opponents do it, namely (of course) Trump voters.
An article at the leftist Vox site at the start of the year acknowledged that threats of violence “are coming from across the political spectrum.” It said, however, that “the most important ones … emanate from the MAGA faithful.”
The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie ominously predicted last week that the former president might “use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions.” On the same day, his neckbeard colleague David French claimed in a separate column that “while political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.”
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Friday whined that Trump has “fanned the flames” of prior “acts of political violence.”
All of this immediately followed — purely by coincidence, no doubt — a series of public remarks by Joe Biden making a big show about how he strongly, seriously, emphatically condemns political violence (wink, wink).
The advantage Democrats have had in recent years is that, unlike independent and Republican voters, they know their activists put politics above everything else. For them, only one thing matters: getting their way. If that means destroying public property and private businesses, so be it. If a few people are hospitalized or die for it, that’s a price they’re willing to pay.
Intimidation and harassment are their default strategies. It’s their voters who screamed in the faces of perfect strangers for not wearing face coverings. It’s their voters who torched and trashed inner cities in the name of “racial justice.” It’s their voters who showed up to menace Supreme Court justices at their private residences. It’s their voters ginning up a second Holocaust over a religious conflict between two nations 6,000 miles away.
True, the other side showed on that one fateful day that it’s capable of taking things to the streets when things aren’t going so smoothly. But rather than Democrats saying to themselves, “Hmm, maybe we should all settle down some,” they proceeded to censor, prosecute, and disenfranchise their opponents.
If there has been any increase in violent threats from the right, Democrats have themselves to thank for it. They might do themselves a favor this time and knock it off before any of those threats are made good.
They chose to drive down this road. Now they understand it’s a two-way street.