There's this quote from C.S. Lewis that will echo for eternity because it describes a basic truth about the vast majority of authoritarians, whether it be your local HOA or wannabe first-world dictators.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I can't help but hear Lewis say that in my head whenever I hear about the left's approval of violence, or even lately, assassination. As my friend and colleague Ward Clark recently reported, an egregiously large number of leftists think that assassinating someone like Donald Trump or Elon Musk is okay:
According to a Rutgers Social Perception Lab-Network Contagion Research Institute brief, 55.2% of Americans on the left “reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified.” Overall, 38.5% hold the same belief.
READ MORE: The Left's Continual Calls for Assassinations Are Growing Alarming
I see a lot of people who talk about the left's violent tendencies and wonder how people can think that this kind of evil should be permissible.
Easy. They don't see it as evil.
The leftist machine has spent a lot of air time and money to produce the idea that anything that falls outside their approved bounds is itself evil, and wouldn't you know it, that's where Republicans and conservatives exist.
How often do you hear the words "threat to Democracy" from leftists? It's spoken so often that anyone who pays attention to politics who leans right of center involuntarily feels their eyes glaze over. We recognize it as hysterics at best, narrative manipulation at worst.
But if you're more of an emotional thinker, as the left is, and aren't as knowledgeable of the left's manipulation tactics, you probably hear this stuff and get a real sense of anxiety. You see these people in positions of authority, or high-profile, professional-looking studios, raising alarms about how Trump, Musk, or the Republican villain of the day are doing x,y, and z, which is sure to destroy the America that you know and love.
It's programming on a scale that's hard to wrap your head around because so many people, networks, politicians, activists, journalists, and more spend billions and billions of dollars to accomplish it, but the repetition of the message from multiple sources isn't an accident. If it threatens the left's goals, it's a "threat to democracy."
It's loaded language that's supposed to make you look at the target with distrust, and hopefully a bit of ire.
Case in point, back in September of last year, Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times attempted to make the people think the Constitution was a threat to democracy once it was clear that it was doing more favors for Trump than it was for anyone on the left.
Thanks to a lot of class warfare talk and hatred of the "ruling class," the idea that "the people at the top are responsible for all the evil and thus whatever happens to them is too good for them" is way more pervasive than many might believe. Luigi Mangione is a hero because he allegedly assassinated the CEO of a health insurance company, yet if you were to ask the vast majority of these people about the man who was murdered, they couldn't tell you a thing about him.
Regardless, he was of the "evil class" and part of an industry that commits a lot of evil, so his death was a moral good in their eyes. Mangione is a hero in their eyes, and this is reinforced by things like Jimmy Kimmel talking about how his staff are fawning all over Mangione live on air.
They don't see that what they're advocating for is inherently evil because they've been told repeatedly that evil is what they're standing against. They've been assured time and again that anyone with an R next to their name is just a Hitler-in-waiting, and that anything or anyone that assists their cause is aiming to destroy civilization as we know it.
They've been told over and over that they want to take rights from women, put black people "back in chains," and institute a theocracy that only white men will profit from. The poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer, and LGBT people will be hunted in the streets.
An absolute joke to people paying attention, but it's a scary idea for people who aren't, yet have had these ideas hammered into their subconscious and reinforced repeatedly.
So they see Trump as an all-encompassing villain who is threatening democracy, not even knowing that we don't have a democracy, but a constitutional republic, and that Trump is hardly the villain in the room. He's not worthy of assassination. In fact, he's just doing the job the vast majority of America elected him to do. He's probably more of a working stiff than the people who think they're working stiffs and hate him for being in that vaunted one percent.
This does bring up a very interesting thought, though.
If most people support assassination because they think it's a moral good to do so, then what does that say about the people in positions of influence and power who don't correct them?
That's where the real moral decay is.
