Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.

But it was far from unexpected.

First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.

But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?

That’s been a team effort.

Society’s been building up to this – and, I think, worse – for a while now. I’ve been predicting it for a decade and a half.

I’m far from the only one.

Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.

This is what we did to Nazis.

We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:

Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:

And so last Monday, a week ago, when the once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:

…and supported it with this…:

We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.

Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.

I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.

It’s nothing new:

Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.

The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.

POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):

He covered last week’s boogieman of the week.

It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.

I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.

But it’s about way, way more than just elections.

Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.

Remember Obama’s DHS Secretary Napolitano memoing America’s law enforcement agencies to expect a wave of conservative terror that would (as re-parroted by the late, unlamented and loathsome “Dog Gone”) dwarf the war on terror that’d been going on in the Middle East for seven years at the time? Or the risible notion that White Supremacy was becoming popular again (notwithstanding the fact groups like the Klan have been shrinking by abour an order of magnitude every generaion)?

What was that but collective slander to create a boogieman to sic the droogs on.

Sic them to commmit violence? Oh, heavens no.

But who can control everyone?

• A nutcase (with progressive roots) attacked the House Congressional baseball team, nearly killing Steve Scalise
• A neighbor with impeccable Democrat credentais assaulted Senator Rand Paul, breaking his rib
• A would-be assassin came cross-country to attempt to kill SCOTUS justice Kavanaugh to try to forestall the overturing of Roef
• Many of the acts of senseless violence I documented for many years sprang, I believe, from the backdrop of inreasoning panicky hatred the left has spent the past 15 years promoting.
• Locally? Let’s not forget the fact that Major Jacob “Humiliiating Mompants” Frey told the Minneapolis Police not to worry to hard about protecting people coming to see Donald Trump at Target Center in 2016 – and didn’t bother intervening in a wave of assaults on the street.
• Also, the March 4 2017 attack by “Anti”-Fa on a group of Republicans in the rotunda the the State Capitol, injuring several in the immediate aftermath of the Trump inauguration.

In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.

So the alarming wonder isn’t that some cretin tried to murder Trump (and succeeded in murdering one of his supporters). And it’s not just lil’ ol’ me noticing this.

The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.

The counter-gaslighting has already begun:

• “It was fake! They sounded like blanks!” (Tell it to the dead man)
• “It was just a piece of glass from the teleprompter!” (That’s very unconfirmed – and irrelevant, since any “piece of glass” would have been propelled by f*cking bullet aimed at Trump’s head)
• “The shooter was a registered Republican! (in an open primary state, who also donated to ActBlue. This one is in the process of falling apart).

But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:

That’s a lie – both in re Biden and in general.

This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.

For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.

And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…

…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.