Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / March 31, 2023

A transgender Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three 9-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school.

Supposedly, she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass killing. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public.

Yet in about a nanosecond after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media.

Three predictable themes surfaced.

• The first was led by none other than President Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer.

Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders.

• Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter’s manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause.
• Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such killing was regrettable, it was also understandable, given supposed Christian, conservative America’s intolerance of transgender people. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.

Did the transgender shooter anticipate that violence for her “correct” cause would be either contextualized or blamed on the weapon rather than she who used it?

Likewise, at about the same time, a transgender activist entered the Texas Legislature and physically fought with the sergeant-of-arms.

Just days after the Nashville shooting, a trans advocacy group decided neither to cancel nor to change the name of its long-planned “Trans Day of Vengeance” protest in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

It was recently disclosed that federal authorities did little or nothing last year when pro-abortion mobs traveled to the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, yelling and disrupting their neighborhoods.

That mobbing was in clear violation of federal laws prohibiting protesters from swarming the homes of justices to influence their opinions. Yet, mysteriously, Attorney General Merrick Garland demurred from prosecuting the lawbreakers or beefing up security.

Amid this environment of general chaos, a would-be assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned up near the justice’s home, but was persuaded by his own sister to surrender.

In March 2020, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had all but called for violence against the justices, when he threatened two by name before an angry pro-abortion crowd protesting at the doors to the court:

I want to tell you [Justice Neil] Gorsuch; I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

What did Schumer mean by “whirlwind,” “pay the price,” and “what hit you”?

On a recent episode of ABC’s “The View,” octogenarian actress Jane Fonda reentered controversy by boasting that women were not going to retreat on abortion rights. And if their marching and protesting were not enough, Fonda smirked, “Well, I’ve thought of murder.”

Recently, Wayne State professor Steven Shaviro posted his views on free speech on campus: “Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”

Shaviro apparently was referring to the mob at Stanford Law School that shouted down 5th U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the campus Federalist Society. Students prevented him from delivering his lecture, apparently for his past refusal to acknowledge the pronouns of a convicted pedophile.

Among the many obscene taunts that were leveled at the judge by Stanford’s future lawyers, one law-school protester shouted that he hoped Duncan’s daughters would be raped.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.; House Majority Leader Steven Scalise, R-La.; and former Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin have all been the target of vicious, politically driven physical attacks.

Most Americans decried the illegal entry into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by protesting Trump supporters. Over 1,000 have been charged, or are in prison, with hundreds more facing indictment.

Yet none in the Capitol were armed. And the only ones to die violently that day were among the protesters themselves.

Not so in the summer 2020. Then the vast majority of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led violent protesters who rioted, burned, and looted for 120 days—injuring 1,500 police officers and causing over 35 deaths—were either not arrested or released.

For that matter, what do Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, Kathy Griffin, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore all have in common? At one time or another, they alluded to various ways of imagining former President Donald Trump’s violent death.

What do Joe Biden; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; and Robert De Niro have in common? They all bragged of their desire to physically assault or beat up Trump.

For the radical Left, ideology exempts its political violence. The result for everyone else is an open season and the end of deterrence—and frightening days ahead.

Above by Dr. Hanson was originally published March 31, 2023 on Daily Signal by the Heritage Foundation here: https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/31/left-wing-violence-chic/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell

“One gains the impression that the frustrated derive as much satisfaction—if not more—from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates. The delight of the frustrated in chaos and in the downfall of the fortunate and prosperous does not spring from an ecstatic awareness that they are clearing the ground for the heavenly city. In their fanatical cry of “all or nothing at all” the second alternative echoes perhaps a more ardent wish than the first.

One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worth-while lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. (9) Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

Things which are not are indeed mightier than “things that are.” (10) In all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted.”

Eric Hoffer, page 73.  The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

150 pages of wisdom and several pages of excellent references.

Available to read or download for free here: https://archive.org/details/1951-hoffer-the-true-believer/mode/2up

Though this book was written by Eric Hoffer in the 1950s, I think Obama will jump out at you as the “fanatic” and Biden as “the practical man of action.”

“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.” P134

A related post on this blog: