Democrats have long believed they alone occupy the intellectual high ground, regardless of the issue.  Recently, their party has undergone an ominous shift.  Part of this involves their staunch refusal to engage in any meaningful debate of the issues -- considering everyone else as just a bunch of cultural infidels.  This is a dangerous mindset, as it threatens the fundamental underpinnings of our civility, and thus the overall stability of America.

The political energy driving the Democratic Party today primarily comes from the Left’s dominance in academia, entertainment, and media.  This affords them an unprecedented ability to influence what most people learn, see, and hear -- carefully controlling both the medium and the message to keep certain demographics increasingly mired in grievance, fear, and hate.  At the heart of it all, of course, is identity politics, producing hotbeds of victim identities that form the basis for the incredibly divisive actions we’re now seeing.

• Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA) called the Trump administration a “bunch of scumbags” and on Twitter the #KremlinKlan. One of her staff added, “It’s white supremacy all over again.”

• Phil Montang, an official with the Nebraska Democratic Party, was captured on audio railing against Republican Congressman Scalise (LA): “I’m glad he got shot. I wish he was f---ing dead.”

• Madonna exclaimed at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged.  Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” 

• Comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a mock decapitated head of President Trump, willingly associating herself with ISIS style propaganda.

• New York’s Shakespeare in the Park staged a production of Julius Caesar with a Donald Trump look-alike playing Caesar.  He was violently stabbed to death by senators in a grotesquely graphic and bloody scene for everyone and their children to see.

None of these examples are about free speech or artistic expression. They’re reflections of extreme intolerance and absolute refusal to accept the outcome of an election. Such public manifestations serve only to feed a political environment already overflowing with agitators propagating violent fantasies about taking down the President by any means possible.

Before the 2016 Presidential election, a video aired showing how Democratic operatives paid people to pick fights at Trump rallies to create a perception of right-winged anarchy, a tactic called “bird-dogging.” Later, Wikileaks revealed that bird-dogging was approved by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook in a July 4, 2015 email.  This all coincided with a DNC plan to cite “incidences of violence” in order to create the perception that “Trump is dangerous.” Consequently, violent assaults against Trump supporters skyrocketed.

Joining student activists, the militant group antifa successfully prevented conservative authors from speaking on college campuses. The recent highly destructive riot at UC Berkeley stands as a prime example. Shamefully, Democrat Congresswoman Val Deming (FL) described the Berkeley calamity as “a beautiful sight.”

With the Left now openly glorifying political violence, it wasn’t surprising to see hostilities jump to the next level with the recent targeted assassination attempt of Republicans at a congressional baseball outing, leaving several seriously wounded.  Later that day, Republican Claudia Tenney (NY) received an ominous email stating, “One down, 216 to go.”

Unfortunately, even with Republican Congressman Steve Scalise (LA) still suffering in the hospital from the assassination attempt, prominent Democrats are going ahead with their plans to ratchet-up the political rhetoric by increasing their usage of an old term associated with overthrowing governments – “resistance.”  To capitalize on this, the Democratic National Committee launched “Resistance of Summer,” a series of anti-Trump events designed to attract impressionable activist-voters to the DNC’s inflammatory rhetoric and then turn them out into the streets. Even some of the party’s more high-profile individuals are getting in on the action.

• Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine (VA) Tweeted, “Democrats have to fight in the streets against Trump.”

• Loretta Lynch, former Attorney General under President Obama, made an impassioned video plea that was posted on the US Senate Democrats’ Facebook page:  

“I know it’s a time of concern for people who see our rights being assailed, being trampled on and even being rolled back.  I know that this is difficult, but I remind you that this has never been easy.  We have always had to work to move this country forward to achieve the great ideals of our Founding Fathers.  It has been people, individuals who have banded together, ordinary people who simply saw what needed to be done and came together and supported those ideals, who have made the difference.  They’ve marched, they’ve bled, and yes, some of them died.  This is hard. Every good thing is.  We have done this before. We can do this again.”

Lynch’s attempt to distort history with improper context while stoking the flames of revolution is pure Saul Alinsky.  What Lynch and others of her ilk always fail to mention is that our Founders, while very outspoken, were incredibly tolerant individuals of honorable character who understood and, more importantly, practiced the art of debate and diplomacy.  Unlike Lynch and others, they didn’t encourage violence as a way to resolve every little issue that didn’t go their way.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most disturbing thing about all of these statements and events is that they collectively work to inform a desperate sociopolitical impatience on the part of the Left that clearly seeks to effect a quicker change in governance than is allowed through proper discourse, demonstrating at the very least their tacit approval of the use of such violent rhetoric and tactics.  Moreover, after further analysis, it becomes difficult to ignore certain glaring historical similarities to how this rhetoric and tactics has been previously used to control certain demographics of the American populace.

This same approach combining violent rhetoric and actual violence was commonly used by the pro-slavery Democratic Party leading up to the Civil War.  But the dark and sordid history of the Left’s violence didn’t end there.  Later, from 1882 to 1964, the Ku Klux Klan -- formally organized by the Democratic Party in 1866 -- was used to help gain control of the electorate through intimidation and terror, ending with an estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,279 white Republicans being lynched.

An 1868 cartoon published in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama newspaper The Independent Monitor, threatening the lynching of carpetbaggers by the Ku Klux Klan (source)

One could also argue alarming similarities are beginning to appear between the way in which the Left and their leadership in the Democratic Party are acting today and the way radical Democrats acted in 1861 when Abraham Lincoln was elected.  And we all know what happened to Lincoln.

Just as then, many today are in denial about the seed of hatred that is being deliberately planted by the Left.  In 1861, it was Lincoln who drew the ire of the Democrats.  They loathed his vision for America. Today, the same can be said of President Trump.  This is why the Left is so enraged over him.  He’s all about the Constitution and rule of law -- the archenemy of the Left and its relentless march for absolute power.  As long as Trump is in the White House, the Democratic party will never stand down.

All things considered, it would be wise to reacquaint ourselves with America’s political history -- all of it. In the meantime, we should start taking Democrats more seriously.

Kimberly Bloom Jackson is a cultural/media anthropologist and author of Hollywood’s White Identity Crisis: Inside the Movie and TV Industry’s Dash to Diversity and What It Means for America (Summer 2017).  She can be found at SnoopingAnthropologist.com.