The Madness Returns
Barton Swaim
October 23, 2018 at 4:00 AM
The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason
You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,†Hillary Clinton said recently in a CNN interview. “That’s why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.†The remark was quintessentially Clintonian in its brazen arrogance: We’ll act like adults when you give us our power back. She was roundly condemned for the statement on the right, coming as it did after a series of both outrageous rhetorical attacks and criminal physical assaults on Republican officeholders. In June of last year a crazed leftist attempted to murder GOP lawmakers while they played baseball—and nearly succeeded in the case of Steve Scalise. Five months later, Rand Paul was throttled by an irate neighbor and suffered several broken ribs. In 2018, Republican officials have been chased out of restaurants, targeted by a failed ricin attack, criminally “doxxed†online, nearly stabbed by a knife-wielding assailant, and shrieked at by deranged protesters. Conservative intellectuals have been assaulted, threatened, and bullied by students on campuses across the country. If we associate the extrajudicial antics of Antifa with the left’s drift toward incivility, the situation begins to ring alarms.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/barton-swaim/the-madness-returns
