Democrats’ Gun Barrel Politics

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” — Mao Tse-tung, 1938
In America, though, political power has traditionally come from the ballot box. But, today, American tradition is under assault — literally.

In June, a hard-left Democratic activist, a Bernie Sanders supporter, tried to gun down Republican congressmen on a Virginia ballfield, after which GOP representative Claudia Tenney received an email threat reading, "One down, 216 to go." The same afternoon, a prominent New Jersey Democrat issued a tweet with the hashtag #HuntRepublicanCongressmen.

Last August, Democratic protesters in Minneapolis assaulted Trump supporters, including an elderly man, and attacked a Trump motorcade. A Tennessee Trump supporter was assaulted at a garage sale[!]. In September, California Democratic activists beat up a Trump supporter. In October, a North Carolina GOP office was firebombed and spray painted: “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else.”

Post-election, physical acts of inflammatory-rhetoric-fueled violence increased and worsened. Left-wing assaults on Trump supporters occurred in Maryland, Florida, New York, California, Texas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere, most covered only by local media. National media, collectively the party’s house organ, largely ignore violence by Democrats.

This year, left-wing violence and destruction continued nationwide, including at inauguration protests. There were liberal riots and/or assaults on college campuses including UCal Berkely and Claremont McKenna and Middlebury Colleges. GOP congressman were threatened in Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee and North Dakota, some assaulted by Democrats attending town hall meetings.

More recently, headlines featured some Democrats’ fascination with presidential assassination: “Leaked Screenshots Reveal BuzzFeed Director Wishing for Trump Assassination” and “Assassination Threats Against Trump Flood Twitter.”

These violent eruptions are part of a decades-long left-wing pattern beginning in 1962 with a communist’s assassination of President John Kennedy. 1960s urban riots in Harlem, Watts, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Chicago and Detroit and the decade’s campus violence were all inspired and carried out by leftists.

Conservative Republicans didn’t take lives, destroy neighborhoods, loot businesses, occupy campus buildings, torch ROTC headquarters, shoot policemen or bomb the State Department and a military induction center, and they’re not responsible for pervasive inner-city gun violence.

No conservatives joined the ranks of radicals in the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers or Black Lives Matter.

Today, non-Islamist political violence in America is primarily a left-wing phenomenon. Even the left’s notions of “artistic expression” â€" a president’s bloody severed head and a play featuring the murder of a character made-up to resemble the president â€" have become violent.

The American left-wing’s aggressive impulses mimic the “Sturmabteilung,” or SA, the German Nazi Brown Shirts described in understatement by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, as “ruffians" and “bullies." SA thugs and murderers played important roles in the Nazi Party’s formative years. We all know how that turned out.

Democrats should ratchet back their incendiary rhetoric and the violence it incites, respect election results and, above all, learn history’s lessons: If they persist in what they’ve started, they won’t like how it ends. Nobody will.

http://www.pottsmerc.com/opinion/20170620/jerry-shenk-democrats-gun-barrel-politics