Someone Could Get Hurt

Reaction to President Trump’s rally in Florida last night continues to reverberate. Some time before the event got underway, CNN’s Jim Acosta, who has made a career out of being a Resister, was reporting from a visible position in the hall when he was heckled by Trump supporters who chanted, among other things, “CNN sucks” and “fake news.” Acosta tweeted this video along with an expression of concern about possible violence:


Acosta’s tweet has occasioned a fair amount of reaction, some of which you can read about here.

What is striking to me is how unself-aware Acosta is. He is “very worried” that “hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.” But what about the violent, anti-Trump hysteria that is whipped up by many on the left, including Acosta himself? Someone already has gotten hurt, badly, as a result of that anti-Trump and anti-Republican frenzy, namely Steve Scalise. It is a miracle that he and other Republican Congressmen weren’t killed by Bernie Sanders volunteer and Republican hater James Hodgkinson.

That was only the most dramatic example of violence from the left, “whipped up” by reporters like Acosta. Many people have been assaulted because they were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. See, e.g., here, here, here, here and here for a few samples.

This is nothing new. Anti-Trump violence has been going on for two years. Have Jim Acosta and his fellow Democratic Party reporters really not noticed? I wrote just after the 2016 election:

In America, political violence is pretty much exclusively a phenomenon of the Left. The election of Donald Trump has precipitated a wave of violence, which the New York Times acknowledges rather grudgingly:

Thousands of people across the country marched, shut down highways, burned effigies and shouted angry slogans on Wednesday night to protest the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

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British readers of the Daily Mail got a far more accurate picture of what went on:

Violence has broken out at anti-Trump rallies across America overnight as tens of thousands marched against the President-elect before angry mobs attacked police, started fires and shut down highways.

The streets of downtown Oakland in California were choked with smoke Thursday as police launched tear gas and protesters lit fires, in what became by some distance the most violent of the many protests against the election of Donald Trump.

More than 6,000 protesters were seen on the streets of Oakland with an initially peaceful march down a cop-lined street turning nasty after some protesters threw bottles at officers and torched a police car. An office block was also attacked, daubed with ‘f*** Trump’ and ‘kill Trump’ graffiti and then set alight.

Many liberals apparently yearn to murder President Trump; or, at any event, they like to talk about it and create images of his violent death. “Kill Trump” is a sentiment commonly expressed by liberals.

Follow the link above for photos of violence by anti-Trump Democrats. Also here.

It is possible that an extreme right-winger could try to harm a Democratic Party politician or reporter, or a Democrat wearing a Bernie Sanders t-shirt. But political violence exists pretty much exclusively on the left, and it has been going on for the last two years, at least. I’ve seen no sign that such violence concerns Jim Acosta–or, for that matter, any other liberal reporter or politician.

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