Most Democrats seem to be getting over last week’s thumping well enough, but a horrific fraction seem to have bought into their leaders’ irresponsible, apocalyptic rhetoric — and so are damaging themselves, their families and even their children.
The most obvious case is Anthony Nephew, the Minnesota man who apparently killed his wife, ex-partner and his two sons before taking his own life in reaction to Donald Trump’s victory.
Yes, he evidently had longstanding mental-health issues; we’ll never know how much of his final crisis came from marinating for years in the extremist, hateful rhetoric now common on the left.
But there’s some connection: Why else did Democrats from President Biden on down call for a lowering of the temperature after the first attempt to assassinate Donald Trump?
Too bad the whole party quickly turned back to “fascist” and “end of democracy,” not to mention “Nazi” and “garbage.”
And pushing outright lies about abortion, their other main issue this year.
For the record, no state bans aborting an ectopic pregnancy. None of them criminalizes having a miscarriage, nor surgery to save the mother’s life. Every hospital in America is legally obliged to treat a woman suffering complications after taking abortion pills.
All the folks spreading misinformation to the contrary (including, obscenely, health professionals and so-called journalists) are, sickly, endangering the lives of vulnerable women.
Yet rank, hateful distortion is now routine for Democrats: Back in 2021, recall, Biden was raging about “Jim Crow 2.0,” the Georgia voting law that . . . has now seen two straight elections (2022 and 2024) with record turnout. (Major League Baseball still owes Atlanta an apology for pulling the All-Star Game over that.)
And the mainstream media’s loss of basic fact-checking standards puts fuel on the fire: Remember, CBS Evening News led a nightly newscast the other week with the outright lie that Trump had threatened Liz Cheney’s life.
Panel after panel on CNN (not MSNBC) features contributors foaming at the mouth at how people voted for a “convicted felon” who “says he’ll be a dictator and use the armed forces against his domestic opponents” — all bogus talking points about Trump.
The general public tunes it all out — that’s why Trump still won the national popular vote.
But some still believe it, and now are emoting on social media about how they’ve now cut off all ties with their “MAGA” parents, children or whatever.
You’re family, and you can’t find something agreeable to talk about?
Add in, too, the liberal moms that Bethany Mandel rightly scourged in Saturday’s Post: “real people, and unfortunately, real parents, who have decided to inflict severe emotional distress upon their children as some kind of political virtual signal” by needlessly inflicting Trump-is-Hitler propaganda on their kids.
The unhinged hate takes all manner of forms: On “The View” last week, Whoopi Goldberg seriously announced, “Your grocery bills are what they are because the folks that own the groceries are pigs.”
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden know better: That’s why they’re moving on as leaders do after any lost election — Biden, even with a big smile.
And all the Democratic operatives who went along with the campaign of hate, fear and lies know it too: They made their bucks doing their best to try to win despite having no real issues, using tactics that have become routine for their party — and confident that most of the press would play along.
Indeed, most Democrats still believe that Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016 — even though the entire Russiagate fable in the end rested entirely on stories made up under an “opposition research” contract from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The New York Times and Washington Post split a Pulitzer Prize for amplifying that disinformation.
Unlike the so-called “disinformation experts” who demand a vast censorship apparatus to supposedly purify our “information spaces,” we believe in free speech, including the freedom to tell outright lies (subject, of course, to libel laws and related penalties).
The best answer, the only practical answer, to untrue speech is true speech.
But that true speech can and must include calling “Shame.”
So shame on Biden, Harris, the Obamas, CBS, the Times and all the rest: For nothing but short-term partisan ends, you’ve been sickening the minds of good people whose only mistake is to trust you.
It’s a sad thing indeed that so many of our leaders think nothing of poisoning the American mind.
