Over Labor Day weekend, everyone was talking about how Joe Biden came out of his basement and, after months of silence, was finally addressing the rising tide of violence and looting in America's cities.
But this misses the point entirely.
Joe Biden isn't late in addressing political violence.
The truth is, Biden's was one of a myriad of voices on the Left, in the media and within the Democratic Party that have repeatedly used violent rhetoric and imagery in their opposition to Donald Trump and Republicans generally.
Here is what Joe Biden said two years ago in a speech at the University of Miami, speaking of Donald Trump:
"I said, if we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."
For years now, prominent Democrat politicians, media figures and Hollywood celebrities have been repeatedly, and explicitly, calling for violent acts against those who stand in the way of their progressive utopia.
While it's true, as media "fact checkers" claim, that Biden has occasionally voiced opposition to riots and looting in the abstract, he has pointedly refused to condemn his own supporters who advocate attacking or even killing the president of the United States.
"I'd like to punch Donald Trump in the face," the Hollywood actor and Biden supporter Robert De Nero snarled on television, knowing, of course, that he could never make good on his threat and that therefore there was zero risk in him making it.
And De Nero is hardly alone. A year earlier, the actor Johnny Depp asked, "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?"
Or as the sexagenarian sex kitten and Biden supporter Madonna put it, "I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House."
Now Biden and his fellow Democrats are pretending to be shocked – shocked! – that people are taking the Democrats' violent rhetoric to its logical conclusion, walking into the streets and shooting their political opponents dead, as occurred in Portland on August 28.
The alleged shooter in Portland, Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, who described himself online as "100% Antifa," was himself shot by federal marshals September 3 in what the controlled media might call a "mostly peaceful arrest."
Hours before, Reinoehl told a far-left news site that he believed a "civil war" was coming to America.
"Honestly, I hate to say it, but I see a civil war right around the corner," Reinoehl said. The killing in Portland, he added, "felt like the beginning of a war."
Given the hate spewed by many far-left Democrats and their supporters, it's hardly surprising that the lunatics among them would finally put the Democrats' violent rhetoric into action.
Just six months after Trump's inauguration, in June 2017, an unemployed Democratic Party activist, child abuser and vehement opponent of Donald Trump opened fire on 24 Republican congressmen as they were practicing for a softball tournament, nearly killing U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and badly wounding a police officer, congressional aide and a lobbyist.
Investigators found the mass shooter was an avid participant in Democratic Party Facebook groups, including one labeled, "Terminate the Republican Party."
More recently, however, far-left Democrats have turned from fantasies about assassinating Trump to actively encouraging riots, looting and what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls "uprisings."
As part of these "uprisings," some Democrats are openly demanding that their followers harass and intimidate their political opponents on the streets, in restaurants and even outside their own homes.
"If you see anybody from [Donald Trump's cabinet] in a restaurant," screeched Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, in a famous rant that went viral on the Internet, "in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd."
Of course, this is nothing new for the extreme Left of the Democratic Party.
Its members have openly called for violence against their political opponents for more than 50 years – even as some older Democrat leaders, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, have denounced such tactics as "un-American."
People forget, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s the extreme left of the Democrat Party was planting bombs in government buildings, murdering police and school officials in cold blood, and doing everything in their power to trigger a race war.
These violent lunatics didn't go away.
They became "educators" and lawyers, passing their hatred and fanaticism on to a new generation of would-be Marxist revolutionaries. The son of two convicted Weathermen killers, Chesa Boudin, is now the District Attorney of San Francisco.
As a result, it's not enough that Joe Biden has belatedly begun to run ads against looting now that looting is beginning to "show up in the polls."
Rather than take responsibility for his party's violent rhetoric over the past four years, Biden simply blames Trump for the fire bombings and now murder in the streets.
Yet no one is fooled. The American people know who has egged on the rioting and looting for the past months.
For Biden to pretend that he cares even a little that his supporters are burning America's cities and threatening people in restaurants is simply too little, too late.
Robert J. Hutchinson writes about the intersection of politics and ideas. He is the author of numerous books of popular history, including, most recently, "What Really Happened: The Death of Hitler" (Regnery, 2020). Read Robert J. Hutchinson's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.