"James Hodgkinson seems to have slipped down the memory hole.
Hodgkinson was the left-wing activist who accused Donald Trump and Mike Pence of treason and — “fueled by rage against Republican legislators,” as the Virginia attorney general put it — attempted to massacre a group of Republican congressmen practicing for a baseball game. He shot Representative Steve Scalise, along with a Capitol Police officer and two others, and very likely would have murdered a goodly chunk of the GOP caucus if not for the police assigned to protect Scalise, the majority whip. Senator Rand Paul was there, too, and escaped injury — that time: A few months later, he was attacked while mowing his lawn, suffering six broken ribs. The man who attacked him, Rene Boucher, is a left-wing Chomskyite social-media rage-artist who wrote about his desire to see someone “fry Trump’s gonads.” In 2013, a gunman attacked the conservative Family Research Council. In 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson massacred police officers in Dallas. Before that, five men associated with the Occupy movement made plans to blow up a bridge in Ohio.
We have a memory, a faint one, of Democrats lecturing Republicans about their “tone” not so long ago, something about Sarah Palin and metaphorical crosshairs.
We are a long way from arguing about graphic design.
The Democrats in 2018 seem to have taken the wrong lesson from Hodgkinson and the rest: They have embraced stalking and terror as political tactics. The so-called antifa have firebombed college campuses and committed political violence in order to silence dissenting speakers and to bully students into political conformity; Democrats have taken up stalking with gusto, recently chasing Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant, while Representative Dave Brat recently discovered stalkers photographing his cars and property; police cordons have been broken, and buildings have been entered illegally; Senator Susan Collins has been threatened with rape. Hillary Clinton told her gang: “You cannot be civil.”"
How quickly we forget.
