Today Rand Paul warned that there might be an “assassination” if those who are “ratcheting up the conversation” don’t start toning it down. As a guy who was attacked and badly beaten just last year, he knows what he’s talking about. We should listen to him.
But, as I detailed yesterday, Democrats are headed rapidly and resolutely in the other direction. Many prominent Democratic figures and lawmakers have explicitly encouraged the chaos and violence. Many others have remained approvingly silent. Eric Holder is the latest Democrat to try his hand at stirring up a mob. He told a cheering crowd, “When they go low, we kick them.” He also called for “rage,” and, most startlingly, openly questioned the “legitimacy” of the Supreme Court.
Now, when Holder calls into question the legitimacy of our governing institutions, and Maxine Waters tells her supporters to follow Republicans around and “tell them they’re not welcome anywhere,” and Hillary Clinton assures us that liberals “cannot be civil” because Republicans are so evil, and Mazie Hirono justifies mob behavior by calling the mobbing hordes “motivated,” and Cory Booker exhorts his base to “get up in the faces” of Republican congressmen, we must conclude one of two things:
1) These leading Democrats are too stupid to know what they’re doing.
2) These leading Democrats know exactly what they’re doing.
I do not think they’re stupid. That leaves only the second option. The only real question is whether Democrats are simply unconcerned with the violence they might cause or if they actively want the violence. I think there is plenty of reason to suspect the latter.
Politicians are calculated. Especially Democrat politicians. Especially Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton. There is a reason why they have chosen now — with tensions so high, and anarchists in the street shutting down traffic and assaulting motorists, and senators’ families receiving graphic death threats — to start using particularly militant language. A guy like Eric Holder, who was the Attorney General of the United States not long ago, doesn’t announce that the “legitimacy of the Supreme Court can justifiably be questioned” on a whim. He well knows what happens when people begin to believe that the government is illegitimate.
Of course, there is one odd detail to consider here. The side that seems to be chumming the water for civil unrest is also the side that is famously opposed to gun ownership. An editor at Think Progress recently said that Republicans should be confronted “where they eat and where they sleep.” Yet Republicans are the ones with all the guns. The Left is itching for a confrontation with people who have them outgunned by about 3 to 1. It’s a miracle that one of these motorists or innocent bystanders accosted at an Antifa rally hasn’t already pulled out a firearm. If the Left plans to ratchet up the violence, the chances are greatly increased that they might find themselves on the wrong end of one of these “confrontations.”
You have to wonder whether that is part of the plan. Do Democrats want gun owners to start losing their cool in the face of provocation? Or have they not thought that far ahead? Either way, their strategy is diabolical and dangerous. We are headed to a very bad place if they do not put an end to this madness.