Normalizing Democrat Violence - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Normalizing Democrat Violence
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Bette Midler doesn’t like Republicans. She hates them. Her Twitter feed is a non-stop bilge pump of vitriol.

Bette Midler didn’t like Senator Paul’s perspective on the budget. Her mean tweet received nearly 4,000 RT’s and 23,000 “likes” referencing a violent act by her fellow Democrat against Senator Rand Paul.

Rand Paul was blind tackled by his neighbor. He didn’t hear him because he was wearing protective headgear while mowing the lawn. Senator Paul ended up with broken ribs, a punctured lung, and then pneumonia that resulted in hospitalization. Why? No one is talking about it now, but it’s implied that his neighbor didn’t like his politics. Senator Paul said that the guy “Just lost it.”

But this wasn’t the only time this past year that Senator Paul was attacked by a Democrat. He was at the softball field when a crazed Democrat showed up, after days of meticulous planning, to shoot and kill as many Republicans as possible. He would have succeeded, too, if the Secret Service hadn’t been there for House Leaders. As it was, Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot and nearly killed while the rest of the innocent Republicans were terrorized.

When Democrats aren’t actively attempting to kill Republicans, they’re laughing at the misfortune of Republicans. A group of Republicans were going on a retreat when the train they were traveling on with their families was hit and derailed. There were critical injuries and one train engineer died. Democrats laughed.

It’s easy to forget all the incidences of Democrat violence. Here’s a reminder:

 

Then there are the marauding AntiFa gangs that started on the day of President Trump’s inauguration — these folks broke window fronts, started fires, destroyed property.

Don’t forget the night of the Inauguration Balls when outraged Democrat voters spat on the celebrating Gold Star men in tuxes and women in ball gowns.

Republican and conservative and even liberal speakers and professors who refuse to surrender have been threatened, physically attacked, and verbally assaulted. The thought police behind this violence have worked to get people who don’t think “correctly” fired from jobs.

This violence-enforced totalitarianism has leaked from campuses into corporate life. How many non-conformist thinkers have been fired from supposedly “open-minded” businesses like Google that we don’t know about?

The rot doesn’t stop there. Small business people are not immune. Suffering the wrath of jack-booted ideologues, nuns, cake-makers, and anyone else who refuses to submit, must die–via legal means. These people are permitted to exist but only as long as they do not express themselves in their art, profession, or personal life. Let them be an example to all the rest who might dare disagree. Let them be shunned and marked as anathema.

Spoiled brat Olympians feel at liberty to libel Vice President Pence to prove their bona fides to their fellow travelers.

Rhetorical censure, threats of violence, and actual violence serve to steer behavior. It’s been successful.

The infractions against “Woke-ness” are evolving. They’re more random and arbitrary. Andrew Sullivan wrote a long post about the inevitable backlash to the overreaching #MeToo Movement. But will there be a backlash? Or will there be more violence and counter-violence?

Even Bill Maher is worried:

Yet Bill Maher created this world he now decries. He spent his youth at the Playboy Mansion, continues to be an emotional juvenile who cannot commit at 60, and seems to fear relationships with women who are his peers. He lived Tinder before there was Tinder and now, he’s concerned about romance and “courting”? He talks about the dissonance between the #MeToo Movement and Tinder and yet has a history of objectifying women while professing to be pro-women. One suspects that his concern about the #MeToo Movement is selfish. The hate is now hitting a little too close to home.

This seems to be the pattern for all liberals finding themselves at the point of the bayonet. “But I have right think! Don’t murder me!”

Liberal comedians decry that no one has a sense of humor. Professors decry conformity of thought (well, some do — many are dressing in black and firing pepper spray or doing sit-ins or intimidating students or administrators along with their thug students). French women decry being stripped of their sexual agency.

Too late.

What was once about assault against women is now vengeance against all men. Men, like Christians, like mothers, like Republicans, like Trump are inherently evil. The violent Democrats believe themselves to be good and fighting against evil. Their favorite quote to justify their actions? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

They’re doing something. They’re dehumanizing their ideological opposition. They’re depriving their fellow Americans of freedom to assemble and speak and even property and life, if possible. And they feel justified.

Folks are wondering at the violence of young men who pick up guns or build bombs and seek to kill. Malcolm Gladwell extrapolates on the theory Mark Granovetter put forth that explains how people act against their beliefs to join a riot or looting, for example. It goes like this:

In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero — instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that — and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group. [Emphasis added.]

Malcolm Gladwell applied this theory to the rising phenomenon of violent young men killing their peers at school. It could also be applied to Democrats whose actions are increasingly indiscriminate and violent. Somehow, normal people are depersonalizing their neighbors and find it easy to hate them, make fun of them, jeer at their misfortune, stalk them, make them lose their jobs and livelihoods, attack them while mowing their lawns, and even shoot them.

Ruth Meyer, a Democrat from North Carolina, embodies this phenomenon. Here’s how she justifies her anger:

I wanted to be with people who shared my anger. Because I have been so angry about Donald Trump this past year. I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.

My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, “I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President.” The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.

“I have not yet found a way to quell it,” she says. This is fascinating. Hillary Clinton lost the election and her “fury has been bottomless.”

Look at the groups she’s depersonalized: Trump, the country, her neighbors, rich people, coal miners. Anyone who disagrees with her.

On the way back from the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., her Prius decorated with a virtue-signaling beacon “Resist” sticker broke down. A self-described redneck and his son helped her on her way. She assumed a couple things: 1) that his politics must differ from hers 2) that her depersonalization of people with whom she [may have] disagreed was all Trump’s fault.

Her rationalization is classic psychological projection. She says:

As I drove home, I felt the full extent to which Trump has actually diminished my own desire to be kind. He is keeping me so outraged that I hold ill will toward others on a daily basis. Trump is not just ruining our nation, he is ruining me. By the end of the drive, I felt heartbroken. [Emphasis added.]

Like the teenage boy with a gun, justifying his rage at “society,” Ms. Meyer points the blame not at her own inability to integrate a humiliating and hope-defeating loss, but at the person who won and anyone else who “won” by extension. His awfulness (in her estimation) explains her retreating from her porch and hating her neighbors.

She concludes, “How do we hold onto the fire fueling our resistance to the cruelty Trump unleashes, but also embrace the world with love? I wish I knew.”

After being helped by a stranger she pre-judged (prejudice), she externalizes her bad behavior, projects it on a scapegoat (many of them), and concludes that she can’t find a way to fight for her ideas and be loving.

Ruth Meyer, communications consultant, average American, believes her baser impulses are justified because she didn’t get what she wanted.

Her hate may be only corrosive to her, but some enterprising Democrats have taken it further. Campus witch-hunts depriving young men of due process. Professional witch-hunts getting co-workers fired. Political witch-hunts resulting in political allies stepping down from elected office. Beating neighbors. Attacking professors. Shooting politicians.

Democrat influencers, like Bette Midler, make fun of the violence, encouraging anti-democratic and anti-American vicious behavior. They are inflamed with the fires of righteous oppression.

Edmund Burke, who is wrongly attributed the “Good Men” quote, actually said something more prescient for our fiery times:

In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

Violent Democrats are possessed of “vehement passions” and using them to oppress and persecute. There is no indication that they’ll choose to be loving any time soon.

Melissa Mackenzie
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Melissa Mackenzie is Publisher of The American Spectator. Melissa commentates for the BBC and has appeared on Fox. Her work has been featured at The Guardian, PJ Media, and was a front page contributor to RedState. Melissa commutes from Houston, Texas to Alexandria, VA. She lives in Houston with her two sons, one daughter, and two diva rescue cats. You can follow Ms. Mackenzie on Twitter: @MelissaTweets.
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