I don’t typically write about breaking news — there are plenty of sites out there for that — but this is too significant to pass up. Earlier today, there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Someone at a Trump rally fired at least a dozen gunshots,1 one of which grazed his head, leaving him bloody but fully conscious and in control of himself as the Secret Service dragged the defiant candidate to safety. In addition, at least one attendee was killed during the attack.
If the race weren’t already effectively over after the recent debate, it definitely is now; if anything’s going to garner sympathy among undecided voters, it’s this.
This just keeps happening
Hearing this story makes me think, there seems to be a lot of this going around in recent years.
Less than two years ago, we had a guy run down a Republican teenager with his car for being part of a “Republican extremist group”.
Likewise in 2022, a man outfitted with a gun, a knife, and all manner of tactical and burglary gear showed up at the home of Justice Kavanaugh, prepared to kill him, and might have followed through on it but for the intervention of his sister who managed to talk him down and get him to turn himself in.
In 2020, we had an entire summer of BLM and Antifa terrorists rioting throughout the country, killing dozens and causing billions of dollars in property damage.
In 2017, the Congressional Baseball Game was interrupted by a Leftist activist (and former Bernie Sanders campaign member) who opened fire with a gun, injuring multiple people including Representative Steve Scalise. (Scalise had been labeled a white supremacist associated with a hate group founded by a former KKK member by the SPLC, in a Facebook post Liked by the shooter.)
Also in 2017, social scientist Charles Murray, falsely labeled a white supremacist by the SPLC, was violently attacked and hospitalized by a mob of students at Middlebury College, where he was supposed to be giving a presentation.
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, armed with a handgun and 50 rounds of ammo, attacked the headquarters of a conservative legal institution with the stated goal of killing as many people as possible. He managed to shoot and injure one security guard, who despite his injury managed to disarm and restrain Corkins until the cops showed up. Corkins also had the address of another conservative group’s headquarters on him; he had gotten both targets from (once again!) the SPLC.
And it just keeps going. The last person involved in Presidential politics with an assassination attempt against him was President Reagan. Meanwhile, do you remember ever hearing about right-wing extremists attempting to murder Presidents Biden, Obama, or Clinton?
No. Why? Because it didn’t happen.
It’s not just a recent phenomenon
Throughout the 1970s, Leftist terrorists ran rampant in a mostly-forgotten spree of bombings and murders. Prominent terrorist leader Bill Ayers, who by all rights should have died in prison, got off scot-free, became a university professor, and ended up mentoring a young activist named Barack Obama, who began his political career from Ayers’ living room.
In the 1950s, extreme-Left activists attempted to assassinate President Truman over issues of Puerto Rican separatism, and more of them attacked Congress four years later, injuring several Representatives. (The latter group of assailants were later pardoned by President Carter!)
Heck, the first-ever assassination of a US President was, of course, the very first Republican President, targeted for his political actions suppressing Democrat separatism in the Civil War, for which John Wilkes Booth labeled him a “tyrant” (sound familiar?) and murdered him. With the sole exception of JFK, every assassinated President has been a Republican. In addition to Trump and Reagan, there was a near-miss assassination attempt that injured Teddy Roosevelt.
Rule #1 always holds true
And so, what would Democrat Rule #1 lead you to expect? Exactly what we see today! Whether it’s media reports on “far-right extremism,” the FBI calling right-wing extremists the biggest domestic terror threat to the nation, or official military training (!) defaming pro-life groups as domestic terrorists, we see over and over again, that despite the Left holding a near-monopoly on political violence, they try to portray conservatives as violent extremists who are constantly threatening or committing political violence.
Yeah. It’s called rule #1 for a reason.
Remember this, the next time you hear about our side allegedly being violent extremists. If that’s so true, why does the overwhelming majority of political violence, from Presidential assassination attempts all the way down to murders of innocent teenagers, occur against conservatives by deranged Leftist activists?
07/26/2024: And there’s the other reason why I don’t like writing about breaking news: the facts are often not clear immediately. Later investigation shows he fired a lot fewer shots than that, and the numbers that got reported right away were exaggerated.
As the old saying goes, guns don't kill people; Democrats kill people.