The latest attack on President Donald Trump did not take place in an ideological vacuum. Whatever else investigators conclude, it cannot be denied that it was another flare from a political culture that has spent years teaching an eager audience that Trump is not an opponent, but an existential evil.
Unsurprisingly, the familiar Democrat machine went into motion almost immediately.
Gavin Newsom made it about safety at an event celebrating the press. Obama cautioned against premature certainty about motive. Jeffries and Schumer pontificated about condemning political violence in all directions. Everyone became very balanced and very concerned that “all sides" tone down the rhetoric.
How convenient. How untethered from reality. And how masterfully they seek to numb willing minds from seeing that the bullets are coming almost exclusively from one side.
The problem is not what Democrat leaders say after the weapon appears. The problem is what they say before.
For years, the Democrat Party and its loyal media adjunct have cultivated a moral vocabulary in which Trump is not merely wrong, crude, reckless, authoritarian or unfit. He is Hitler. He is a fascist. His movement is an urgent existential threat. His supporters are not mistaken citizens, but semi-fascists and enemies of democracy.
Biden said MAGA Republicans represent “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic" and described MAGA philosophy as “semi-fascism." Hillary Clinton labeled Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables." Nancy Pelosi referred to federal officers in Portland as “stormtroopers." Kamala Harris said Trump “is a fascist." Tim Walz echoed the claim that Trump was “the most dangerous" person in America and “a fascist to his core."
Across the party and its sycophantic media ecosystem, ordinary political opposition has been recoded as fascism, white supremacy and authoritarian existential menace to democracy and life on Earth.
Aside from their glandular hatred, there is a political reason they keep doing this. In lieu of a serious governing vision, and in lieu of solid arguments on crime, immigration, inflation, education, energy or national security, the left returns again and again to the Nazi file. It ignites the base, flatters activists as moral heroes and turns get-out-the-vote work into anti-fascist resistance. Democrats do not have to convince voters that their policies are better if they can convince them that the alternative is Hitler.
Then, when someone from that eager audience absorbs the message and acts as though he is living in 1933 Berlin, the same people become priests of restraint and befuddlement.
We must not speculate. We must not politicize. We must wait for all the facts. We must remember that violence has no ideology. We must condemn political violence from the left, right and center.
No.
Their rhetoric is neither accidental nor unclear. It has consequences because it is designed to have consequences. The point of calling Trump Hitler, MAGA fascist and ICE Nazi-like is moral permission. It tells the angry, the alienated and the self-righteous that ordinary democratic opposition is inadequate because the danger is too grave. It teaches people primed to see themselves as heroes of resistance that if Trump is Hitler, defeating Trump is not enough. Stopping him becomes a moral emergency.
If Trump is Hitler, normal rules become cowardice. If ICE agents are Nazis, attacking ICE is noble resistance. If conservatives are fascists, destroying them is democracy defending itself.
This is the poisonous brilliance of the modern left’s rhetorical game. It teaches that speech is violence when conservatives speak, and violence is speech when leftists riot. A conservative policy argument can be dangerous “erasure." A conservative judge can be accused of endangering lives by ruling from the Constitution. A conservative joke can be treated as a threat. But when a left-radicalized attacker picks up a weapon, motive becomes complicated, ideology becomes unknowable and everyone is urged to lower the temperature together.
When a deranged man attacked Paul Pelosi, the national press knew exactly what it meant before the blood was dry: the natural consequence of right-wing conspiracy theories. When Jan. 6 happened, it became the interpretive key for every Republican in America. But when Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter, when a leftist traveled to Washington DC to Kavanaugh and two other justices, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated - by a leftist, when Trump has been targeted again and again - by leftists, and when ICE and federal officers are attacked amid relentless demonization - by leftists, suddenly the lesson becomes cloudy.
The attackers were not all identical. But the atmosphere that fed them was unmistakable. They were born of the left’s demonization machine, and then the same machine pretended not to recognize its own children.
The media’s first instinct after left-coded violence is often containment. Hide the motive. Blur the ideology. Universalize the lesson. Say “all sides." Say “gun violence." Say “mental health." Say “heated rhetoric." Say “we may never know." Anything but the obvious. That is not seriousness. It is laundering.
The smug media loves to pretend it is merely asking questions, reporting facts and holding power to account, as if it could not possibly play a major cultural role in forming public opinion, shaping moral permission and teaching an eager audience whom they are allowed to hate. That pretense is obscene. The press does not simply describe the political atmosphere. It helps manufacture it, then feigns innocence when someone starts breathing the fumes.
Americans are not stupid. They can see which facts are highlighted and which are smothered. They can see when one madman indicts a movement and when another becomes an inexplicable tragedy floating free of politics and ideology.
That is why “all sides must tone down the rhetoric" is such an insult. It is not a call for moral seriousness. It is a fog machine. It dissolves a particular pattern into bipartisan mist and allows the people who spent years pouring gasoline on the culture to appear above the flames once someone strikes a match. For those who like to see the data, Batya Ungar-Sargon just published a brilliant aricle debunking the left’s pet theory that most political violence emanates from the right.
Jeffries can talk about all political violence. Schumer can look grave. Obama can pretend we know nothing. Newsom can make it about press freedom. But the country heard Trump called a fascist, MAGA voters called threats to democracy and federal officers compared to stormtroopers. It heard the left insist that speech kills, rhetoric radicalizes and language endangers lives.
Fine. Let us take them at their word.
Their language has radicalized people. Their rhetoric has endangered lives. Their demonization has helped make violence thinkable. Then, after they light the fuse, they blame “all sides."
The first step toward lowering the temperature is honesty.
-The left must stop pretending that its opponents are Nazis.
-Democratic leaders must stop feeding their base apocalyptic fantasy and then acting bewildered when someone decides he has been deputized by history.
-The press must stop laundering partisan violence through euphemism and uncertainty.
Because this was not an oopsie. It was not a mystery. It was the foreseeable product of a culture that has spent years teaching hatred while calling itself anti-hate.
A political culture that tells millions of Americans that their leaders and neighbors are fascists should not be surprised when someone from its eager audience decides to become an executioner for democracy.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and former adviser to one of Israel’s prime ministers.