Politics, of course, has always been hyperbolic. Both Democrats and Republicans say terrible things about opposition presidents. But there’s probably never been anything approaching the unhinged hysteria aimed at Trump.

For years, it was broadly accepted by the Left that Trump was an asset of a foreign adversary. And when the president wasn’t operating “concentration camps” or stealing votes from minority groups, he was instituting fascism. And this wasn’t the usual vague pejorative synonym for “conservativism.” 

“Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you,” one Washington Post op-ed argued. Though to be fair, another Washington Post op-ed disagreed: “Don’t compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. It belittles Hitler.”

Trump is now regularly accused of being a rapist and pedophile and a puppet of the Jews who are plunging us into endless war for personal gain.

“And,” wrote Allen, who’d been marinating in this panic for about a decade, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

There have now been three major attempts to murder the Republican president. Not long ago, Charlie Kirk, one of the most popular conservative voices in the nation, was assassinated. Before that, Brian Thompson, the CEO of the largest insurance company in the country, was murdered on the street. Before that, a leftist showed up with a Glock, zip ties, and duct tape to assassinate a Supreme Court justice. Before that, a Bernie Sanders fan attempted to eliminate the entire Republican House leadership on a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia.

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That’s not even to mention the “free Palestine” activists who show up at protests with firebombs or murder Israeli Embassy workers on the streets of Washington. Or the fire-bombings of Tesla dealerships. Or the antifa fire-bombings and attacks on police stations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Or the attacks on pregnancy centers after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Or the Black Lives Matter riots, the most destructive in American history.

When a would-be terrorist shows up at the Capitol with Molotov cocktails to kill Republican officials, we barely even talk about it.

That’s a pattern. That’s a big problem.

Marxist violence has always been with us. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a communist in Dallas. The only other president assassinated in the 20th century, William McKinley, was killed by the bullets of radical leftist Leon Czolgosz. A slew of communist and anarchist terrorist bombings culminated in the deaths of 30 people on Wall Street in 1920.

Most cultural depictions of the ’60s and ’70s offer us genteel, peace-loving hippies. The reality was an unprecedented rise in left-wing terrorism, led by groups such as the Weather Underground, which were setting off bombs at the Capitol, police stations, the Pentagon, and the offices of attorneys general. In an 18-month span between 1971 and 1972, there were 2,500 bombings in the United States by leftist groups.

It seems to me that things could easily go back in that direction, or worse, because the contemporary Left is increasingly and openly comfortable with violence.

In the weeks before the attempted assassination of Trump, the most talked-about left-winger in the country was Hasan Piker. The podcaster has argued that the U.S. deserved 9/11, extols the rapists and murderers of Hamas, implores his followers to “kill capitalists,” specifically Sen Rick Scott (R-FL), and maintains that the GOP is “the biggest domestic terrorist organization” in the country, among many other unhinged positions.

“Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy,” says Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist who positions himself as a reasonable centrist yet always ends up cowering to the fringe. Piker has campaigned for high-profile candidates such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is held up as the model of progressive politics.

Recently, Piker was invited by the Yale Political Union to advocate the resolution, “End the American Empire,” though there’s zero evidence that the Twitcher has any expertise on the topic of empire, or the U.S.

My point isn’t that Piker lacks talent as a podcaster. Maybe he’s great. It’s that his violent pro-terrorist communist rhetoric is the only reason anyone cares about his politics. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Pod Save America, Yale, the Bulwark, New York Times, and others who welcome Piker into the Democratic Party tent, are trying to attract young socialists who are comfortable with Piker’s violent ideas.

There’s a clear moral and ideological continuum between those who rationalize the assassination of CEOs or the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists or argue that burning down cities for social justice is understandable, and those who act on those ideas.

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While discussing the ethics of “microlooting” — stealing — on a New York Times podcast with Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino, Piker noted that the murder of Thompson was understandable since he had been involved in “a tremendous amount of social murder,” an inane Marxist notion that maintains capitalists create the conditions that lead to premature deaths. Justifying theft corrodes the social contract. Accusing capitalists of “social murder” offers a justification for murder.

When Thompson was allegedly killed by Luigi Mangione, many high-profile progressives rationalized the execution after offering some tepid, perfunctory condemnations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), for instance, argued that “people can only be pushed so far.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), “the Squad,” and many other liberals framed the assassination as a product of poor and working-class frustration over healthcare insurance. One poll found that over 40% of young voters say that the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO was “acceptable” or “somewhat acceptable.” Over 23% between 30 and 39 say the same.

One of the problems with Warren’s contention is that Marxists are most often products of privilege. That has been the case since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Piker grew up rich. Mangione is a former Ivy League engineering student from an affluent family. Allen was a teacher with a degree in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Ted Kaczynski was a math prodigy with a doctorate in engineering. The leaders of the Weather Underground were overwhelmingly college-educated and wealthy.

That’s because political violence is most often glorified and spread by the pampered “intellectual” Left. Kathy Boudin, a Weatherman involved in a Brinks truck robbery that killed two innocent people, ended up operating Columbia University’s “Center for Justice” for decades. When I was young, spoiled cosplaying revolutionaries would romanticize Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, or Noam Chomsky. Angela Davis, a friend of murderous dictators who once purchased guns for a Black Panther terrorist attack that ended in murder and kidnapping, is still popular among progressives.

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Our university system is teeming with detestable pseudointellectual extremists. Beloved liberal authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates champion identitarianism and violent bigotry. Every American institution run by leftists demonizes conservatives, the capitalistic system, the Constitution, and our history, treating all of them as immoral and existential threats to “democracy,” if not humankind’s survival. College students and podcasts are indoctrinated into believing Republican presidents are no better than Hitler or that the “profit motive” is murdering the poor, when the opposite is true. And if you accept the notion that conservatives are guilty of mass “social murder,” you would also believe it was completely ethical to steal or shut down a speech or stop traffic or glue yourself to a great work of art. Some, those who live in bubbles of radicalism, might even believe they have a moral imperative to do something more dramatic.

No, the modern Left doesn’t have a monopoly on political violence, but it is far more inclined to use it, justify it, celebrate it, and rationalize it. And it’s only getting worse.