Political Violence

In recent months there has been a building media refrain around the theme that Donald Trump is a threat to Democracy and that the possibility of violence instigated by Trump was growing increasingly likely.

The tendentiousness of these claims would be amusing were they not so frustrating. One wishes to attribute honest motives to journalists, even progressive journalists, but how can sincere motives explain the utter moral blindness of this refrain?

Eddie Scarry at The Federalist reminds us that political violence and calls for violence, were until January 6th, solely the province of the Democrat left. From Antifa to BLM to the Pro-Hamas demonstrators, violence, harassment and vandalism, both actual and threatened, have been an almost exclusive staple of leftist political action in this country.

As examples of progressive hand-wringing over the possibility of right-wing excesses ling right around the corner Scarry gives us these:

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....

The above warnings notwithstanding, extremist, destructive behavior is much more likely to be a resort of the left than of the right. Yet the media seems oblivious, either willfully or otherwise, to this fact:

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.

He's correct, of course. He's also correct in his conclusion:

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.

If there is violence perpetrated by the right in 2024, one of the main catalysts for it will be breaking-point frustration with a judicial system that allows leftists to get away with it- and a media that excuses it - while transgressors on the right are punished to the fullest extent of the law.