Trump-Hating Kinzinger’s Anti-Constitution Violence - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Trump-Hating Kinzinger’s Anti-Constitution Violence
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Illinois “Republican” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a worshiper deep in the heart of the Trump-hating cult that is symbolized by the corrupt, anti-Constitution January 6 Committee, made the Washington Post’s headlines the other day by saying this:

GOP member of Jan. 6 committee warns that more violence is coming

The Post quotes Kinzinger, without the slightest sense of self-awareness of the violence he himself has been doing to the Constitution, as follows from a weekend appearance on ABC’s This Week:

“There is violence in the future, I’m going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”

The story goes on to say:

Kinzinger, who defied party leadership by serving on the Democratic-led committee, described an alarming message he received at home in the mail several days ago threatening to execute him, his wife and their 5-month-old baby.

“I’d never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area,” he said.

Stop. Full stop.

Let me say the obvious. It is self-evident that Kinzinger and his family should not only have never received such a disgusting threat, but that no one in American public life should ever receive them.

That said, it is startling to realize that a sitting member of Congress does not understand that when he goes to work in Washington in one of the three House office buildings, not to mention the U.S. Capitol itself, there is a reason all have 24-hour, around-the-clock security — as members of Congress have for decades, long before Kinzinger was born, much less was elected to Congress.

Rep. Kinzinger seems clueless about the constant threats to America’s elected federal government officials or, for that matter, any number of non-office-holders in the media or public life in general.

As a House and Senate staffer in the 1970s and 1980s, every single entrance to the House or Senate buildings where I was working had, yes, 24-hour security. There was a reason for it.

Here is but one sample of an episode that took place when I worked in the U.S. Senate, as per Politico:

Bomb explodes in U.S. Capitol, Nov. 7, 1983

The story says:

At two minutes before 11 o’clock in the evening on this day in 1983, a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the U.S. Capitol’s Senate wing. Since the area was virtually deserted at the time, there were no casualties.

Minutes before the bomb went off, a caller claiming to represent the “Armed Resistance Unit” warned a Capitol switchboard operator that a bomb had been placed near the chamber — purportedly in retaliation for the recent U.S. military actions in Grenada and Lebanon.

Not to be forgotten either was the 1954 attack on the House chamber by leftist Puerto Rican nationalists which wounded five House members. One could go on with this type of list as there are other examples.

The hard fact of real life which seems to escape Kinzinger is that threats of violence have been directed at people in the public political eye for all of American history, not to mention world history. (Can you say Archduke Ferdinand? Whose assassination — along with his wife — in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in 1914 touched off that small skirmish known as World War I?) Obviously, there is no excuse for it. But the reality is that it happens — and always has.

Back there in the ancient days of the 2016 campaign when I was frequently appearing on CNN and standing up for then-candidate Donald Trump, my home phone was repeatedly targeted with snarling, anonymous voices leaving threatening messages because they hated Trump and hence me. Is it wrong? Of course. Does it happen? All the time. Does it have anything to do with Donald Trump? Of course not. It has to do with deranged individuals like whoever sent Kinzinger that note.

The other evening, The American Spectator’s own R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. hosted a delightful evening dinner with special guest Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the GOP House Whip. Scalise, recall, was almost killed by a gun-toting, Trump-hating Bernie Sanders fan, with three other Republican House members shot and wounded. Was this Sanders’ fault? Of course not.

The point is sadly crystal clear. It has always been the case that political figures in public life attract controversy, and, sad to say, threats of violence. America is, after all, the country where four presidents have been assassinated. Two (Theodore Roosevelt, then an ex-president, and Ronald Reagan) survived assassination attempts, and four more (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford) narrowly missed being hit by flying bullets or, in Jackson’s 1835 case, becoming the first president to be attacked, in that case on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, with his attacker’s misfiring gun aimed in his direction. All of this, obviously, long predates Donald Trump.

And speaking of what Kinzinger warned of as “more violence coming,” here’s a newsflash. Political violence is here — right now. For some curious reason, Kinzinger neglects to mention this story that is, as this is written, in the news. Here is the Fox headline:

Letter signed by radical abortion group Jane’s Revenge declares ‘open season’ on pro-life pregnancy centers

The letter from Jane’s Revenge says ‘increasing drastic measures’ might not be ‘so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti’

The Fox story reports this:

The pro-abortion radical group dubbed “Jane’s Revenge” that’s claimed responsibility for various arson attacks and vandalism since the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade published a new letter Tuesday declaring “open season” on pro-life pregnancy crisis centers.

The letter spoke of a supposed 30-day deadline for all pro-life groups to cease operations and condemned those “who impersonate healthcare providers in order to harm the vulnerable.”

The letter goes on to say that:

Through attacking, we find joy, courage, and strip the veneer of impenetrability held by these violent institutions.

Needless to say, this pro-violence left-wing group has zero connection to Trump or his supporters. As with the political violence over the centuries in America, their threat comes from the American Left.

To name but three of many examples in American history, whether it has appeared in the form of labor violence, anti-Vietnam War violence attacking the Pentagon, Occupy Wall Street leftists attacking Wall Street, or today’s threats of violence over a potential overturn of Roe v. Wade — and not to mention all those hundreds of riots after the George Floyd killing in the summer of 2020 — the American Left is violent. Violence is in its political DNA.

Yet the Trump-obsessed Kinzinger misses the larger point of all this exactly.

Even more to the point, Kinzinger and fellow January 6 Committee member “Republican” Rep. Liz Cheney blithely ignore that they themselves are doing real violence to nothing less than the U.S. Constitution itself.

My colleague Melissa Mackenzie has repeatedly zeroed in on the dangerous hoax and sham that is the January 6 Committee, as here and here. She correctly notes of the January 6 Committee:

It is a political witch hunt. It is, again, the Democrats using all levers of the government against their political opposition à la the Russia Collusion hoax. These people hate Trump so much they’re willing to throw out the rule of law, and their so-called beloved “norms” to destroy their political opposition and anyone who would stand against them.

Whether it was subpoenas being issued to Kinzinger’s House colleagues or prowling through “AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others who are carriers of (private) texts, emails, and phone records,” Kinzinger has signed on for one effort after another to commit violence against the Constitution.

The redoubtable Mark Levin, always front and center in a career of defending the Constitution, has said this about the corrupt January 6 Committee to which Reps. Kinzinger and Cheney have so eagerly lent their names:

This is a sham. This will go down in history as a dark mark on the American political system. We can’t see it now, [but] the mob is in control, the mob runs the media, the propaganda is full-throated, you can’t see it now but history has a way of sobering events. And we will see this one day as the outrageous attack on our system, on the prior president, on scores of people that it truly is. It’s an abomination to the American system, not just of justice but our congressional and representative system.

To sum it all up?

Violence and threats of violence, no matter who or where they come from, have no place in American life. Period. But to take what has, sadly, been a fact of American political life for hundreds of years and ascribe its existence to former President Trump is rewriting history. It is despicable.

Not to mention that by participating in the violence being done to the Constitution by the January 6 Committee, as Kinzinger and Cheney are actively doing, their historical reputation has been forever tainted.

Talk about a self-inflicted wound.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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