Kathy Griffin, “comedienne,” posts a photo of herself holding up the bloodied head of President Trump, gore dripping down his face.

A Central Park production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar features an assassinated Caesar as Trump: The audience roars its approval as Brutus & Co. plunge their knives into him.  Meanwhile, the background music broadcast by the “mainstream” media is playing loud and clear: “Trump is a traitor!”  “He’s a Russian agent!”  “Collusion!”  “Treason!”

The day after the Senate “Intelligence” Committee grilled Attorney General Jeff Sessions about how many meetings he’d had with the Russian ambassador, a gunman opened fire at Republican members of Congress who were practicing for the annual GOP-Democrat baseball game.  Five people were injured, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-IA).  Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) told media he was leaving the game when a man came up to him in the parking lot and asked if the players were Republicans or Democrats.

This was likely the shooter, one James T. Hodgkinson, 66-year-old resident of Belleville, Illinois, who was shot by Capitol police and died from his injuries.  He had plenty of ammo: When he ran out of bullets for his rifle he reportedly continued shooting with a pistol.  More than 50 shots were fired.  If not for quick action by the police, there would have been a lot more dead.

Hodgkinson was a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and his social-media presence reveals a vituperative hatred not only for President Trump but for all Republicans: He was a member of a “Road to Hell Is Paved By Republicans” Facebook group.  One posting on his Facebook page reads, “Trump is a traitor.  Trump has destroyed our democracy.  It’s time to destroy Trump & Co.”  This was accompanied by a link to a petition calling for “The legal removal of The President and Vice President, et al., for Misprision of Treason.”

This is what happens when you yell “Treason!” loud and long enough: The penalty for treason is death, and someone is bound to take you literally.

As I write, the winds of sanctimony are blowing across Capitol Hill.  Calls for “unity” ring in our ears, and Senator Sanders has made a statement on the Senate floor distancing himself from the actions of one of his more deranged supporters.  And yet when supporters of Sanders attacked a Trump rally in Chicago during the campaign, holding Sanders signs while they invaded the rally site and beat up their political opponents, Sanders said nothing.

For the past six months and more, the media, the Democratic Party, and the McCain/Graham wing of the GOP have been accusing the Trump administration of “colluding” with Russia to “interfere” in the 2016 presidential election.  A seemingly endless investigation by at least two congressional committees has assiduously tried to find evidence for this, in a process that increasingly resembles the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930’s.  Story after story appears in the national media, claiming that Republican operatives linked to the Trump campaign “stole” the election from Hillary Clinton.  Hodgkinson merely acted on allegations the media have been “reporting” as fact.

I am struck by something I wrote in this space last month:

The NeverTrumpers project their own sins onto their enemies: It is they, and not Trump and his supporters, who are the true enemies of democracy and of the American system.  If they continue to tread the path they are on, the proof of this may be written in blood.

One needn’t be Nostradamus to have seen this coming.  Nevertheless, there is little or no recognition of the violence embedded in the rhetoric of the NeverTrumpers, which the Alexandria shooting has brought to the fore.  Everything about “The Resistance,” as they call themselves, points to the prospect of blood in the streets, starting with their chosen name, clearly a reference to the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II.  Standing in the shadows, the real leadership of this “Resistance” is the so-called intelligence community, i.e., the coercive institutions of the Deep State, which is busy leaking information gleaned by their spying activities to discredit and eventually overthrow the Trump administration.  These folks embody the very idea of organized violence, and they are doing their best to incite it.

We are now being told not to “politicize” this shooting.  To this,  one can only respond: It was clearly a political act.  Hodgkinson targeted Republicans; he seethed with hatred for Trump, whom he vowed to “destroy.”  If Representative Scalise, the House majority whip—who is privileged to receive special protection courtesy of the Capitol police—hadn’t been at the baseball practice, this would have been the bloodiest political assassination in American history: Dozens of Republican congressmen would’ve been massacred.

Hodgkinson was a nobody, a pawn of forces he never understood—an instrument in the hands of those who know precisely what they want and how to get it.  What we are witnessing today is the fury of the elites when their will is frustrated.  Intent on imposing their will by hook or by crook, they will make sure that this isn’t the last we’ll see of their handiwork.  Indeed, it is only the beginning of a civil war that will either destroy our republic or save it.

The bonds that bind us together as a nation are fraying, and this is by design.  Divide and rule is the byword of the “Resistance,” but they are banking on a victory that isn’t necessarily in the cards.  For the elites are a brittle caste that has isolated itself from the majority of Americans.  The political class is sitting on a volcano.  They won’t realize that, however, until moments after it erupts.    

 

[Slideshow image: By Diliff (Self-published work by Diliff) [CC-BY-SA-3.0]]