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Opinion | Morgan Liddick: The dark side of liberal assassination fantasies

What did we expect? After the nonstop “Trump’s a traitor” din — shading into “Trump’s a criminal” and ending at Kathy Griffin and Shakespeare in the Park offering presidential assassination, what did people think would happen? The only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.

No, Kathy Griffin didn’t pull the trigger on Wednesday morning. No, Nancy Pelosi didn’t draw up a hit list, and Chuck Schumer didn’t pass it to James Hodgkinson. It is the latter who bears sole responsibility for the attack, and he paid for it with his life. But given the current environment of overheated rhetoric, inflammatory allegations, vicious rumors, wild accusations and outright lies in which our politics is drowning, is it any wonder such a violent and unstable man would go Republican hunting? To him, it probably seemed necessary.

For decades, the march of Progressivism was seen as inevitable. The crowning glory was to be the election of Saint Hillary the Long-Suffering, and the final cementing in place of the all-powerful Bureaucratic State. Then, an unforeseen and seemingly random event occurred: The electorate spoke and those who expected to forever rule the deplorable bumpkins beyond the Hudson and the Potomac were rejected. Stung to fury, they began a campaign of calumny, insults and violence against the winner and his partisans; what happened in Alexandria on June 14 was nothing more than the logical conclusion of their rage, verbal and physical.



If one calls for blowing up the White House or clubbing the president to death; if one says that Republicans will kill people and want nothing more than to enslave the populace; if one calls for fighting in the streets, “resistance” to every initiative and the destruction of anything or anyone in the way of this nihilistic agenda; if leaders and hordes do this repeatedly at every opportunity; and if their wild embrace of anarchy is echoed constantly by a media almost completely unhinged by Hillary’s defeat; one will eventually get the blood for which one howls. It’s a simple matter of triggering a critical mass of sociopaths.

Depressingly, we’ve seen it all before from the Democrat side of the aisle. Consider: “I believe that party to be composed … of the worst men on God’s earth; men who would hesitate at no crime, and who have only one object in view — to enrich themselves.” Save for the invocation of the almighty, this sentiment could have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren, but it didn’t. Those words were targeted at Republicans by the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, when the preferred form of Democrat “resistance” was not the angry mob, the Congressional hearing, the occasional beating or fire, but the night rider and the hood. Perhaps Mr. Hodgkinson was a fluke. Equally likely, he was a precursor of worse to come.



Imagine the result had two Capitol police officers not been present on Thursday last. It is clear that the assassin, who belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate Republicans;” who had called for Trump’s impeachment and had posted that, “It’s time to destroy Trump and company;” was there to kill Republicans; the more, the better. He identified his target before his attack and he pressed it until he was shot down. Without the officers, a good part of the Republican Congressional majority might have been killed.

Is this the sort of country we want? Significant numbers seem perfectly OK with it. A co-founder of the Daily Kos says, “Republicans are getting what they want,” reinforcing the foolish idea that “gun control” is the answer. Others comment on Twitter: “It’s a shame more weren’t shot,” and “I don’t care about people I think should die.” Malcom Harris, writing in the “New Republic,” passes it all off as “self-defense” with a loopy reference to Obamacare. This is, to say the least, an attitude without empathy; it is also dangerously ignorant of history.

We are a divided country under Donald Trump, as we were a divided country under Barack Obama. But where previously we used our words and political forms to limit what one side saw as damaging policy; now the other party’s political leaders advocate resistance to everything, by any means, including force. They will smash the Republic if that is what it takes to get their way.

Is this what we want? A broken nation and a crippled government? Vladimir Putin could not have dreamed of more.

And if we don’t want that, what are we willing to do about it?

Morgan Liddick writes a weekly column for the Summit Daily. Email him at mcliddick@hotmail.com.


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