I&I Editorial
The Democratic Party’s far-left wing — or is that redundant? — has pursued a relentless gaslighting campaign against conservatives. It goes like this: Pay no attention to the Democrat fringe’s insane violence of the last year, members of the conservative right are the real troglodytes, prone to extreme political savagery. The Big Media, ambling in their own leftist zombie trance, repeat the mantra over and over. Only problem: It’s utterly false
It should be no surprise that it’s actually the left that has violent proclivities. And now, new data clearly back up what we’ve known instinctively.
The numbers come from the 2020 poll of election opinions by the highly respected and widely cited American National Elections Studies (ANES), a joint effort of Stanford University and the University of Michigan. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation, and while it formally began in 1977, its roots and data go all the way back to the 1940s.
So, yeah, “science.”
We found the chart below in a tweet by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, the renowned Canadian psychologist who has been vilified by the left for not blindly supporting its cultural insanity. The numbers are both enlightening and frightening at the same time.
To save you the effort, we’ll break the numbers down for you.
The poll gauges white respondents’ answer to a question of whether it’s “justified for people to use violence” for political gain. The data compare 2016 responses with the 2020 responses of those who responded “not at all.”
Among those who self-describe as “very liberal,” the share saying “not at all” plunged from 86.9% in 2016 to 66.5% in 2020. For the “very conservative” cohort, the share saying violence was not justified was 95.8% in 2020, an increase from 2016’s 93.3%.
Confused? Let’s put it another way. By subtracting the numbers above from 100%, you get the percentage of those who would on some level support violence, versus those who would not. Using that measure, we find that 33.5% of the “very liberal” now support political violence. Just 4.2% of the “very conservative” group feels the same way.
This means the average “very liberal” person is roughly eight times as likely to support political violence as the “very conservative” person.
By the way, as the chart also shows, the relationship pretty much holds across the political spectrum, with those who call themselves “conservative” of one sort or another far less likely to support violence than those calling themselves liberal or, even, “moderate.”
Keep this in mind in coming weeks as you watch the left maneuver for total control of the U.S., both in the nation’s capital and on the streets.
Now that you’ve gotten used to being told what to do during the pandemic, the left will test other means of domination. At some point, our rageful leftist betters will try violence. As the last year shows, it’s probably inevitable.
There’s a reason why Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has kept 10,000 National Guard troops ringing the Capitol after the Jan. 6 political demonstrations. Again, it’s not about fear, it’s about political control and physical intimidation, the threat of violence.
Last year, the U.S. was wracked by riots and other wanton political destruction by Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other like-minded left-wing extremist groups. The media largely ignored the hate-driven violence. Indeed, one famous screen shot that made the rounds on the internet showed a CNN correspondent standing in front of a burning building while blithely describing the protest as “not, generally speaking, unruly.”
That echoes how the media routinely described last year’s rampages as “mostly peaceful.” It was a lie, pure and simple, the equivalent of a doctor telling a terminal patient’s family that the patient is “mostly cancer-free.” And for the record, last year’s 200 or so riots — which continue today, in places such as Portland, Oregon — left more than two dozen people dead and in excess of $2 billion in property damage.
Sadly, the poisonous media and the Democratic political culture are having an impact. A recent survey by Echelon Systems of Republicans and Democrats was telling: Democrats listed their top three concerns as “Donald Trump’s Supporters,” “White Nationalism,” and “Systemic Racism.” Republicans’ top concerns were actual policy issues: “Illegal Immigration,” “Lack of Support for Police,” and “High Taxes.”
So Democrats see 75 million fellow Americans as the nation’s biggest problem. Given the left’s politically violent tendencies, as evidenced by the ANES research, how long will it be before it uses violence against those it hates?
Sure, these days, the establishment left’s violence is mostly the cultural sort. You know, eBay canceling Dr. Seuss books, or Disney firing Gina Carano for daring to liken intolerant left-wing totalitarians with the Nazis. People lose jobs and livelihoods and free speech, as the left pursues its remorseless cultural war against the right and center. The list is long and distinguished.
But soon, the violence could become very real. Leftist talk of “re-education” camps for conservatives and even “firing squads” is much in vogue. It may be only a matter of time before real violence is used against those unwilling to toe the line. Will it lead to civil war? To an uncivil split of the U.S.? A dictatorship?
If your answer is yes, ask yourself: Who’s the real violent threat to America and its enduring republic?
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
And not one Democrat will say enough. Everything and I mean everything the left accuses the right of, the left is actually doing it. See Cuomo for example. I want a divorce, we have irreconcilable differences.
Great editorial and everyone who reads it wonders about the outcome. I am reading a very long book about the Russian Revolution and the parallels with our left are astounding, even though they had legitimate issues about the Tsar, obviously. Of course, our left believes that the US is the primary source of evil and injustice in the world and must be destroyed to be saved. This editorial had a couple of metrics that don’t jibe with what I am reading. I read that there were 570 demonstrations by the left that became violent riots last year with 25 killed and 700 police officers injured.
The stern dictatorship the Left wants may not be the one they get.
Don’t forget – opaque bubbles enclose incurious progressives who believe that they cannot be wrong and cannot be shamed. If a liberal policy fails, it is never because the policy itself is flawed, but rather because it was not funded appropriately or administered properly or, if those excuses don’t fit, the fault of conservative dolts. It never dawns on progressive true believers that alien ideas may be legitimate, so great is their ideological comfort and the elitism it ensures with their very own in-crowd. The superiority felt by so many progressives is reflected in the desire to castigate the source of objectionable ideas rather than the legitimate target, the ideas themselves that rattle and roil their comfort zones. When you are never in doubt (albeit often wrong), then political disputes may trigger a tripwire into violence.