Political assassinations are in vogue.
Over the weekend, Minnesota state Rep. and Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in their home after a masked man disguised as a police officer convinced the couple to open their door. The arrested suspect, 57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, was a homegrown American. Officials report that in Boelter's car was a roster of dozens of names, including Democratic lawmakers (but no Republicans) and supporters of abortion rights and sister liberal causes. Were they his next targets?
Boelter also allegedly shot (but prayerfully did not kill) Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.
In April, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was allegedly targeted for assassination by arson. The Baltimore Sun editorial board asked with clairvoyance, "What will happen if this conduct spills into state legislatures, too? They have modest protection."
Since 2017, assassination attempts against political figures, including Donald Trump when he was a presidential nominee, have climbed, though Americans have not become more violent overall. Murder rates reached their high-water mark decades before. Gun ownership has not spiked.
A University of Chicago paper from 2023 that sampled surveys from 2,100 adults found that 9% of Americans agreed with the following statement: "Use of force is justified to ensure members of congress and other government officials do the right thing." That percentage translates into 23 million Americans endorsing or condoning political violence -- indistinguishable from domestic terrorism. Of that number, approximately 46% identified as Republican, 21% as independent, and 33% as Democrat.
Elected officials and social media echo chambers are inciting the violence. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has called Trump a "tyrant." He has accused Trump of "trampling rights." He has called Trump an "existential threat" and a "wannabe dictator," and has called on Democrats to "bully the s--t" out of the president.
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Even when considering Gavin Newsom of California and Kathy Hochul of New York, governors of the two largest far-left Democratic states, it is very difficult to find another governor who has indulged in such incendiary political rhetoric.
Trump is no choir boy. Among other things, remember his complacency with the MAGA chant "Hang Mike Pence" on Jan. 6. Threats of violence against federal judges, including the justices of the United States Supreme Court, are also worrisome.
There is no magic elixir. A beginning would be to open every political session or school day with this timeless portion of Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address:
"During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."
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