Post by Michael Smith on Facebook:
The most impenetrable fortress is not a citadel built of concrete and steel, it is a delusional mind built from lies and raw emotion.
It’s way past the time when a rational and moral people understand that while the American left’s causes are not real, their violence most certainly is.
Its not unusual for family and friends to describe a perpetrator of political violence as a “nice, quiet person who never bothered anybody”, because most of the time they are—but interestingly enough, the same gamma ray energy that transforms mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner into a rage monster called the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, transforms that quiet person into a monster who plans and executes an attack on the President of the United States and his cabinet.
Rather than radiation, this “gamma ray” energy is a concoction of hyperbole, half-truths, and lies constantly emitted from Democrat politicians, operatives, and social media influencers and then amplified and beamed directly into the brains and bloodstreams of the Democrat Bruce Banners by willing media mouthpieces who smuggle accusatory premises into dangerous minds via loaded questions as they hide behind a shroud of “objectivity.
Normal, moral people would be shocked if something they said or did cause threat, harm or death to another person and would question their reasoning behind what they did or said. Not so with the contemporary left, and I include the mainstream media in that group (because they are not just friends and allies of the left, they are the left).
President Trump’s interview with Nora O’Donnell last night was a perfect example. O’Donnell feigned concern for a few minutes but that quickly evaporated when she shifted the line of questioning from “Gee sir, we are so shocked that someone would do something like that, but what response do you have to the charge made by the person who wanted to kill you that you are a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor?”
I found that question interesting in that Scott Pelley, O’Donnell’s risible co-anchor of 60 Minutes, had just minutes before casually and uncritically described the January 6th riot as “the insurrection” as if it had been declared such with legal finality and certainty.
The media did take a gut punch with this assassination attempt because the perpetrator expressed the degree to which he had been irradiated by the left-wing media narrative—and it stopped them for a fraction of a second. And I do mean a fraction of a second because the pause was not due to the assassination attempt, it was the temerity that someone would do it in their presence.
Their response was not to self-examine, they went immediately into cover your ass mode with both blame shifting and the “both sides” rhetoric they always use, but that isn’t working the way it once did. When a faction considers speech as violence (and even silence is defined that way) and the cold-blooded public execution of an insurance company executive is defined as “understandable”, you are not dealing with normal, moral people capable of self-reflection.
It isn’t like the world hasn’t seen this process before.
For all the left’s protestation that the right is filled with Nazis, they are essentially making accusations in a mirror. Their tactics of framing accusation as common knowledge are the same as used by Hitler’s movement in pre-WWII Germany to convince the populace that Jews were the real problem.
That shift didn’t happen in a single leap; it was built over time by the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler by combining old prejudices with modern persuasion. Antisemitism already existed in Europe, but the Nazis reframed Jews as a racial and existential threat, then hammered that message through a coordinated propaganda machine led by Joseph Goebbels. Using newspapers, radio, film, and rallies, they repeated simple accusations—blaming Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I and the hardship of the Great Depression—until those claims felt familiar and, to many, plausible. Economic collapse, political instability, and national humiliation made large portions of the population more receptive to scapegoating and promises of restoration.
Once in power, rhetoric became policy. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of rights and citizenship, while escalating acts like Kristallnacht signaled that exclusion and violence were acceptable. Social pressure, fear of punishment, and even material incentives encouraged conformity, while dissent became risky. Step by step—stigma, exclusion, dispossession—the regime normalized increasingly extreme measures. What began as accusation and propaganda hardened into law and, ultimately, into systematic removal and destruction.
If that sounds familiar, it should—and you are not wrong to think that.
Germany stared into Hitler’s mirror and rather than seeing their own reflection, they saw Jews. When contemporary Democrats stare into their mirror, they don’t see themselves, they see Trump and his supporters.
The Democrats, their media allies and the American left, just had the opportunity to ask themselves if they are the baddies—and they paused for a second and then simply ignored it and returned to staring at themselves in Hitler’s mirror.

Good column, hits a lot of points.
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One factor that was not touched on is social media. When it was just newspapers, radio, and TV, in order to get this level of radical, you had to join a group of some kind. If it was extreme enough, that group would only meet in person. And, if you were to start talking about assassinations, political violence, etc… odds are, your social network would talk you down.
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Not anymore. Social media has taken the place of face-to-face interaction, and that calming effect has been replaced with an amplifier. Post on Bluesky/X/Facebook/instagram/reddit/whatever… and dozens, if not thousands of people will like your post advocating for the death of a politician. And, it will get shared hundreds of times. Net result, people begin to think they will be lauded as a hero if they carry out an assassination.
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Social media is the end of polite social discourse.