There's an old bit of political doggerel that applies today more than ever: A "gaffe" by a Republican is a mistake. A "gaffe" by a Democrat is when they accidentally say what they really think. That's been demonstrated over and over again, most recently by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who in a recent appearance infamously stated that any new Democrat majority should aggressively prosecute former Trump staffers, specifically to discourage any young people coming up in the political world from working for any future Republican administration.
That's political intimidation, nothing but, but while this kind of thinking is detestable, right now, for the Left, it's not exactly rare — and it's not confined to the United States. This is becoming a problem for Western civilization, on both sides of the Atlantic. It is falling into the prediction of the poet W. B. Yeats:
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"
Senator Slotkin's remarks, mind you, are a symptom, not the disease. Here's what she said:
Slotkin observed that while Trump has presidential immunity, the people around him do not.
She wants those prosecutions to scare away young conservatives who might want to go into politics.
“I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
That's not a gaffe. You can bet on that. The senator said what she really thinks: That Democrats should wage unlimited legal warfare against Republicans, for the purposes of intimidation. Now, Sen. Slotkin got quickly raked over the coals for her remarks, which is mildly encouraging, but there can be little doubt that she has plenty of company in this, among Democrats and those even farther left.
But that, wrong-headed as it is, is just rhetoric. We have seen threats of open action, and we have seen attempts of open action. Bear in mind that the current president has been the subject of three assassination attempts, one of which only missed killing him by a fraction of an inch. Violent online threats against Republicans have increased at least three-fold since President Trump resumed office in January of 2025.
Violent online rhetoric targeting leading US public officials increased more than threefold between 2021 and 2025—a 5 percent median increase each month, according to new ISD digital analysis. Republicans received 33 percent more violent threats within ISD’s dataset drawn from across X, Reddit, BlueSky, YouTube and thousands of forums, with 47% of all threatening content within the dataset being levelled against President Trump.
ISD found that violent content, including threats, frequently spiked following major political events—including the 2022 execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago and the attempted assassination of President Trump—which drove sharp increases in threatening language aimed at both Democrats and Republicans.
This isn't just happening in the United States, either. The once-great Britain is also seeing the two sides pulled apart. Some in Britain now are openly talking about the possibility of civil war.
Professor David Betz of King’s College London has done something few academics ever manage: he has got a good part of the country talking seriously about civil war in Britain. His case is about the body politic, a fragmenting society, collapsing trust in the state, and the point at which organised groups start using violence to settle what politics no longer can.
That's an alarming notion, but the left-right divide, fueled in large part by leftist policies like open borders, unchecked Third World immigration and ignoring of violent acts by those people, is driving in deep wedges in the people of Europe, and it has happened here too — until the Trump administration slammed shut the open doors on our borders, the United States was well on the way to having a "migrant" crisis like what Europe is suffering today — and the results are predictable. See Paris. See Milan. See Dublin.
Here's the thing: These leftist agitators, who range from sitting United States senators and representatives to anonymous mendicants, simpletons and nincompoops on TikTok, are increasingly calling for retaliation, for lawfare, for violence, but they have no idea what they are messing with.
Among military veterans, those with conservative politics outnumber those with liberal/progressive politics by a two to one margin. That margin is roughly the same for legal gun owners. We have the tools and we have the training. The left does not. The left is concentrated, by and large, in our larger cities, and is dependent on the more conservative countryside for electricity, gas for heating and cooking, for food and water.
Democrats are playing a dangerous game here; a very dangerous game indeed. Elissa Slotkin's remarks are just another in a long list of hateful leftist rhetoric, and such rhetoric has already exploded into violence, in the 2020 riots, and in the three attempts on the life of Donald Trump.
I still think an open, nation-spanning conflict is unlikely, but that could literally change overnight. The indications, the inclinations, are there, and they seem to be growing. If these conflicts break into open civil war, which I still hope is unlikely, the left is in for a rude shock; because, if the nation's divides devolve into violence, the left will quickly find out that we're better at it than they are.
