OPINION:
Democrats have grown accustomed to getting their way. Over the past two decades, they have more often than not held sway over at least one of the levers of power — the House, Senate or White House — while having an ideological lock on the Supreme Court. President Trump changed that dynamic.
Feeling helpless about the present political situation and whipped into a frenzy by a steady stream of media hoaxes, a few alienated leftists have convinced themselves that they should “do something.” That’s why the Justice Department filed attempted assassination charges Thursday against a transgender activist who purportedly plotted to kill a member of the president’s Cabinet.
Ryan Michel English, 24, who goes by “Reily,” reportedly called off the Luigi Mangione-inspired scheme at the last minute. “I’d like to turn myself in” to a Capitol Police officer, he said. Prosecutors said he carried a knife, two Molotov cocktails and a handwritten note that said: “This is terrible but I can’t do nothing while nazis kill my sisters. … [Expletive] them for pushing us so far.”
According to admissions he made during questioning, the goal was to “depose” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before his Senate testimony in January and set him on fire to “send a message.” The backup plan was to burn down The Heritage Foundation.
Spontaneous violence is also on the rise. Last week, a woman walking her dog spotted Ed Martin, the new head of the Justice Department’s weaponization working group, as Newsmax interviewed him on a sidewalk outside Justice Department headquarters. Video shows the woman spitting on the administration official and yelling, “You are a disgusting man,” before resuming her journey.
Assaulting a fed carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison, but a jury in the District of Columbia isn’t likely to convict a fellow Democrat. At least federal investigators won’t be covering up this incident.
In 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the FBI did everything it could to downplay the much more serious congressional baseball shooting that very nearly took the life of now-Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican. A new report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concludes that the bureau under acting Director Andrew McCabe “used false statements, manipulation of known facts, and biased and butchered analysis” to pass off the ambush as a “suicide by cop” attempt.
Even committee Democrats agreed with their majority colleagues that the incident was a “domestic terror attack motivated at least in part by political animus.” Still, they denied that federal officials intentionally concealed evidence of liberal motives.
The FBI’s “suicide” conclusion was never plausible. No uniformed police officers were at the baseball practice. The shooter, a liberal zealot named James Hodgkinson, fired from a concealed position. He had a handwritten note with the physical descriptions of six Republican members to identify targets.
Hodgkinson’s manifesto included gems such as: “How the Republican party has duped the under educated, the religious fanatics, the backwoods, the racists, and the gungho war mongers in to following them.” He also wrote: “A man realizes the political scene has changed drastically over the last 35 years and wants to show the people how to win back the power of the people.”
He unleashed a volley of 70 shots before being put down. Like the angry dog walker and attempted arsonist, the shooter accomplished nothing. Mr. Scalise recovered from his grave wound.
Pundits and policymakers on the left have a duty to lower the rhetorical temperature so fewer impressionable members of their team feel the need to “do something.”
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