It’s been heartwarming to see, once these contentious midterm elections were past us, how the Democrats rolled up their sleeves and got right to work on delivering the things they’d promised: affordability, equal opportunity and world peace.
Haha, just kidding.
Instead they immediately started seeking revenge.
“We’re not afraid to impeach Donald Trump . . . who continues to act like a king or an emperor,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared after the Democrats’ big wins.
“We have an absolute psychopath running the country,” agreed Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.).
For all their “Love Trumps Hate” sloganeering, what we’ve seen from leftists lately is pretty much all hate, aimed at anyone who counters their agenda — not just Trump, but his supporters, staff and donors.
Comedian Dave Chapelle’s ghoulish remarks about the murder of Charlie Kirk are typical.
Quoth Chappelle on Saturday, from the stage of Madison Square Garden: “I mean look, ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered … and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but I feel better.”
No, Dave, you shouldn’t say that publicly. Really, you shouldn’t even think it.
Kirk was a decent and loving man, a husband and father, a speaker known for engaging his opponents with respect — and then handing them a microphone to let them speak, too.
His real crime was that he entered college campuses, those bastions of leftist hegemony, and persuaded college students to think differently.
Opposition is unforgivable, effective opposition even more so.
Kirk paid the ultimate price for expressing conservative principles, and Chappelle is willing to approve that publicly — to his audience’s glee.
Meanwhile, NYU professor Scott Galloway last week damned Trump ally Elon Musk as a “traitor to the West” and called for his public execution, a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
If we’re going to start executing traitors to the West, I’ve got a little list. . .
But Musk isn’t on it, and Galloway might not like who is.
Galloway claims to be angry at Musk for enforcing Starlink’s terms of use in Ukraine, which has illicitly used the civilian service for tasks that might kill people.
The left’s real beef with Musk, of course, is that he bought Twitter, denying Democrats a monopoly on political speech while allowing others to express ideas the left dislikes.
(Galloway added that his fury at Musk forced him to sell his Tesla, but only after “taking a giant dump in the passenger seat.” That’s the “intellectual” left for you.)
Not to be outdone, popular Democratic podcaster Jennifer Welch and her cohost Angie Sullivan laughed it up on Thursday at the idea of “digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again.”
It’s a notion eerily reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War, when leftists exhumed the bodies of nuns and put them on display, still in their habits, for public mockery.
After losing many sponsors, Welch and Sullivan issued a lame apology — but does anyone really believe they’ve repented of the sentiment?
And it’s not just comedians and podcasters: When Trump named Stephen Miller to be his chief of staff, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded by likening the aide to a “malignant tumor” that must be “excised.”
Sarah Palin was accused of murder for putting out a list of “targeted” congressional districts; Jeffries’ comment is at least as much of a threat.
If I had to guess, the Venn diagram of people who would cheer if Trump were assassinated, and those whose lawns bear “Hate Has No Home Here” signs, is pretty close to a circle.
All this is unspeakably dangerous, of course.
You can’t have a democracy without civil society, and you can’t have a civil society in which one large chunk of it is salivating at the prospect of murdering the other.
But that’s what we see today, with much of “mainstream” culture egging it on.
And it’s not just that this language is ugly and divisive: Democrats are actively promoting violence with this heated rhetoric.
They are creating — deliberately, I think — a climate in which unstable people are encouraged to commit acts of violence against their political enemies, without leaving obvious fingerprints.
On Friday, when an armed-to-the-teeth Venezuelan migrant was arrested near the White House saying he’d been “hearing voices telling him to kill President Trump,” my first thought was: “Were those voices on MS-NOW, Bluesky, or on Jennifer Welch’s podcast?”
It’s good for clicks and attention, but extremely destructive to the larger society — unless you think that what America needs is a bloody and vicious civil war.
Talk about your traitors to the West.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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