Democrats’ Hypocrisy on Political Violence Runs Deep
There is a reason Republicans don’t wear t-shirts emblazoned with the image of Augusto Pinochet, but Democrats do wear shirts emblazoned with the image of Che Guevara.
After the Civil War, the Democratic Party (with the notable exception of the Ku Klux Klan) had renounced employing domestic terrorism, armed insurrection, and political violence as tools for advancing their agenda. This nearly unanimous bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats prevailed for around 100 years, throughout syndicalists and anarchists bombings and assassinations, including of President William McKinley. It prevailed up through the Puerto Rican nationalists’ 1950 assassination attempt on President Harry Truman, which claimed the life of White House Police Officer Leslie Coffelt; and the 1954 attack in the U.S. House Chamber, which wounded five representatives, including the Hon. Alvin Barkley (R-Mich.).
In each instance, the overwhelming majority of the country supported the convictions under law of these terrorists. And, of course, the same was true with regard to the perpetrators of the political violence that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kennedy brothers.
But as the Baby Boomers came of age and the Vietnam War raged, the consensus regarding political violence, armed insurrection, and domestic terrorism began to change. While the overwhelming majority of anti-war protestors were non-violent, there emerged a group of leftist domestic terrorists and violent insurrectionists—many of them the privileged spawn of well-to-do parents—bent upon the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, which they deemed a fascistic, imperialistic empire.
Inured with a sense of entitlement and purblind by the false “revelations” of their communistic ideology, they used the war as justification for pursuing their political goals by any means they considered expedient—including armed robbery, bombings, and murder. Many of the members of left-wing domestic terrorist organizations—like the Weather Underground (which bombed a police station, the Pentagon, and the Capitol) and the May 19th communist organization (which also bombed the Capitol)—were arrested and convicted; others beat the rap due to the authorities violating laws protecting defendants’ rights, which are not usually found in fascistic, imperialistic empires.
Excusing, Condoning, Rewarding
In the aftermath of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the public soul-searching over issues related to the unpopular conflict, such as war crimes, the status of draft dodgers, and the rectitude of deferments, resulted in a collective moral lassitude. America wanted to move on from the Vietnam War, and the personal, familial, and national conflicts it created. And few had more reasons to want the past forgotten or rewritten than America’s domestic terrorists, armed insurrectionists, and other practitioners of political violence.
The first harbinger of the reality that these domestic terrorists and armed insurrectionists could evade the full—or, in some cases, any—punishment for their crimes occurred when President Jimmy Carter (who also granted clemency to draft dodgers) pardoned the four Puerto Rican nationalists who had wounded five U.S. Representatives in the House chamber. It was a precedent for pardoning domestic terrorists that was followed by both of his Democratic successors—Bill Clinton, who commuted the sentence for explosives and weapons of Susan Rosenberg; and Barack Obama, who commuted the sentence for seditious conspiracy, attempted robbery, explosives, and vehicle theft of Oscar Lopez Rivera.
This was a critical step in the Democratic Party’s capitulation to the radical Left’s support—excusing, condoning, and ultimately rewarding political violence and domestic terrorism…..
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Continue reading this article published on February 5, 2021 at American Greatness.
