Leftist Violence Reaches Nadir in Assassination Attempt on GOP Lawmakers

"Pretty soon, all of this assassination talk will get someone shot," I told my Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson on Tuesday afternoon.

And on Wednesday morning, it happened.

James T. Hodgkinson, 66, opened fire on an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball diamond where Republican lawmakers practiced for their annual charity face-off against Democratic colleagues. Hodgkinson, a far-Left Democrat, shot House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Capitol Police officers David Bailey and Crystal Griner, congressional staffer Zach Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika.

As the Daily Caller detailed, Hodgkinson explicitly hated President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans.

• "Trump is a traitor," Hodgkinson wrote on Facebook. "Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co."

• The shooter belonged to a Facebook group called "Donald Trump is not my president" and another named "Terminate the Republican Party."

• Rep. Jeff Duncan (R - South Carolina) said that as he left the ballfield, Hodgkinson "asked me if this team was the Republican or Democratic team practicing. He proceeded to shoot Republicans."

Hodgkinson’s pulls on the trigger of his rifle likely were eased by the constant drumbeat of Left-wing violence, blood-soaked imagery, and hateful rhetoric about Trump. This venom did not ooze from obscure, fringe elements. Rather it cascaded from the mainstream: platinum-record-earning musicians, TV stars, and a taxpayer-funded drama company operating in the heart of Central Park.

• Madonna told January’s Women’s March in Washington, D.C.: "Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House."

• Rapper Snoop Dogg produced a video in which he fires a gun beside the head of a clown dressed like Trump. Out pops a flag that reads: "BANG!"

• Former CNN personality Kathy Griffin notoriously posed with a blood-drenched, mock severed head of Trump.

• The Public Theater’s current production of Julius Caesar features a Trump-look-alike emperor being stabbed to death by Roman senators.

The Left claims that "both sides do this."

Nonsense.

Yes, some on the Right questioned Obama’s birth certificate. But conservatives and Republicans did not stage Obama’s symbolic assassination. A Missouri State Fair rodeo clown was fired in 2013 for performing in an Obama mask. That’s about as rough as Obama ever got it on the center-Right.

Beyond this aspirational violence, the Left lately has committed actual mayhem, demolished property, and wounded Trump supporters and other conservatives.

• Masked "anti-Fascist" savages welcomed former Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos to U.C. Berkeley by setting blazes and slamming metal barricades into plate-glass windows. Those riots injured six people and blocked Yiannopoulos from speaking.

• Left-wing hooligans hounded sociologist Charles Murray after a March appearance at Middlebury College. They surrounded Murray and a professor who accompanied him. "Someone pulled my hair, while others were shoving me. I feared for my life," she said. "I am still wearing a neck brace, and spent a week in a dark room to recover from a concussion caused by the whiplash."

• Corey Cataldo, 24, wore a Making America Great Again hat on a New York City subway last November. "Great. Another white Trump supporter," a large black man told Cataldo. He then tried to strangle Cataldo before fleeing the Number 5 Train in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, for all the talk of Trump being a "bully" surrounded by "racist," "violent," and "terrifying" supporters, Hillary’s voters grieve in peace. And the only people arrested for making scores of anti-Semitic threats earlier this year were a Left-wing black former journalist and two liberal Jews. None was tied to Trump.

The idea-free Left should be ashamed of themselves. Their poisonous clouds of hate blew a very angry man around the bend. While "terminating Republicans," he hospitalized five innocent citizens, two of whom were in critical condition, as of this writing.

The Left’s carnage-inducing words and images have reached their apotheosis. It’s far past time for liberals to stop whining about an election they lost fair and square, leash the dogs of war, and, instead, craft a positive agenda for the American people.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. He has been a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Read more opinions from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.