In the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi by an illegal immigrant lunatic in San Francisco a lot of people on the left have been pointing to what they perceive to be violent rhetoric on the right as responsible for this sort of political violence.
With that in mind my jaw dropped the other night when NBC historian Michael Beschloss on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes went completely bonkers as he predicted the horrors that await if there's an electoral "red tsunami" on Tuesday.
He claimed that Tuesday's election could signal the end of democracy in the United States if the Republicans win. He expressed fear that we could be headed for a brutal authoritarianism, that our freedom to speak and write what we want could be lost and that our children will be arrested and killed - all if the Republicans win the House of Representatives, the Senate and a number of governorship's in Tuesday's mid-term election.
Now, aside from the fact that Beschloss' fear-mongering sounds a lot like Chicken Little running about shouting that the sky is falling, and aside from the fact that it's the left that's the source of almost all attempts to curtail freedom of speech in our society - from suspensions of social media accounts to university cancel culture - consider how Beschloss' febrile prognostications of doom might affect a mentally unbalanced listener prone to violence.
Such a person - think of James Hodgkinson, a left-wing political activist and Bernie Sanders supporter who shot six people in 2017, nearly killing Republican Steve Scalise - might well reason that if Republicans are a threat to our democracy and the lives of our children then killing Republicans is not only justified, it's a moral imperative.
How many Democrats are likely to hold Beschloss accountable for his irresponsible, paranoid rant, especially if there's violence against Republicans in the coming days.
Let's hope we don't have to find out.
Here's the clip of Mr. Beschloss venting his fantasies on Chris Hayes' show (it might take a moment to load):
