Mostly Peaceful Assassinations

The attempted assassination of President Trump was on the right side of history. The inch that spared his life was on the wrong side of history.

Leftists see history as a series of confrontations between progressive and reactionary forces. The escalation of those confrontations from political protests “dissent is patriotic” to violent riots “the language of the unheard” to terrorism “the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature” is blamed on the failure of society to become sufficiently socialist.

The right side of history arrives when society, and all conservative and reactionary forces, is overthrown. Assassinating a president, especially a reactionary one, is a means to that end.

Over the last 9 years, liberals had pursued every possible legal and illegal means from secret investigations to lawfare to street violence to prosecution on invented grounds to stop Trump.

Are we supposed to believe that the same political interests that defended the violent BLM riots as “mostly peaceful” were willing to shrink away from a targeted assassination of Trump?

Just call it a mostly peaceful assassination.

Nearly every Democrat politician, media outlet and cultural force has consistently made the case for the last 9 years that Trump is a unique threat that must be stopped by any means.

If there is anything that they have demonstrated over the years, it’s that they don’t believe any value, principle or safeguard matters more than getting him. Or getting to the right side of history. A movement vandalizing art treasures, killing babies and destroying black neighborhoods for the greater good could hardly quibble with one man’s death.

Every legal and moral code has been made subservient to the right side of history. The ends of saving the planet and transforming society always justify the means. Violence is a means. Like racism or breaking into the Capitol, it’s not inherently wrong, its morality rests on whether it falls on the right and progressive side or the wrong and reactionary side of history.

To regret the violence is to also to regret the movement. Those liberals who came to regret the violence eventually became conservatives because they came to question the ends.

Liberals ask us to accept two incompatible notions, that Trump is Hitler and they regret his attempted assassination. But if Trump indeed is Hitler, then wouldn’t shooting him be justified? Either they don’t believe their own analogy or they don’t regret the assassination attempt.

There’s no doubt that the obsessive hatred for Trump is real, but the need is as real as the hate. Every Republican presidential candidate, even the most milquetoast of them like Mitt Romney, have been compared to Hitler because the right side of history needs someone to hate.

Trump, unlike Romney or George W. Bush, understood that and embraced the persona. In contrast to many other Republicans, he didn’t expect to be liked by those who wanted to hate him. And the right side of history is all about finding someone to hate to justify the violence.

The greatest lie that leftists tell themselves is that they are violent only as a reaction. Someone, society, an economic system, human nature, always started it and they’re the ones fighting back. The reality is that the real purpose of every radical movement is violence. The promise of utopia is unachievable, but the impossible dream and its accompanying impossible standards justify the destruction of every flawed institution and the flawed people who live by it.

In France, leftists rioted before and after they won the election. Why riot after you’ve won? Because violence is both the means to victory and the ultimate purpose of victory. Out of power, leftists riot, in power they kill. The right side of history is the power to kill absolutely everyone.

Killing Trump was not an aberration, a turn away from the right side of history, but the thing itself. In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, the machinery of denial and projection hums along, spinning off conspiracy theories, projections and rationalizations. Ear truthers claim that Trump wasn’t really hit. Prominent intellectuals and academics speculate that it was a set up. Democrats and the media explain that it’s conservatives who are the violent dangerous ones.

An act of violence is an opportunity for self-examination. Mass murder, as Stalin was said to have pointed out, operates on the scale of statistics which is impossible for people to take in. Anne Frank is comprehensible where the Holocaust is not. A single story or moment can crystalize violence while a systematic campaign of destruction is too big to take in.

The Trump assassination attempt did what previous larger scale outbursts of leftist violence, like the congressional baseball game shooting, the campaign against the justices and BLM race riots could not because the man at the center of it had become the symbol of the unwoke. The seconds of the assassination showed what the right side of history really looks like up close.

The Left fears that moment because it understands the power of symbolism. It cannot bend economies to its will, command the ocean tide or change the human heart, but it understands how to tell a story because telling stories is what it does. The right side of history is a story that killed millions. The Trump assassination is the story of the right side of history. And its ugliness.

The Trump assassination, like the terrors of the French and Russian revolution, and Mao and Pol Pot in China and Cambodia, show what happens when the Left actually gets what it wants.

In Butler, PA, liberals briefly tasted what they had wanted all along. Some were shocked while others gloried in it. And that is not only the story of the Trump assassination, but of the Left. It’s the story of two centuries of mass murder, torture, fear, terror and the destruction of everything.

The right side of history doesn’t unite us, it doesn’t offer hope and its only outcome is death.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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