Was Churchill right about America?

Miguel Martinez/AJC

JD Vance, 48 hours after admitting to Dana Bash of CNN that Haitians eating pets in Springfield was a concocted story, is crying crocodile tears about the tone of campaign 2024. It is quite extraordinary, given his enormous appetite for racist demagoguery and devotion to Donald Trump, whom he once despised and decried, but now venerates.

Two days ago, Bash asked JD Vance why he was pushing a vicious and racist lie that the mayor of Springfield, Ohio, was begging him to stop spreading. It has resulted in an explosion of bomb threats at hospitals and schools from people clearly incited by the lie. This is as clear an example of cause and effect that there has ever been.

Vance’s response made the point that the vicious racist lie and accompanying threats were good for the people of Springfield, who needed attention from the national media, despite the mayor begging the MAGA insanity to stop.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell, 1984

Here was JD Vance yesterday speaking at the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition in Atlanta trying to blame the escalating violence in American politics on the political coalition and party opposed to it, while trying to stifle debate about Trump’s dangers, menace and manifest unfitness.

I'm not going to say that conservatives always get things exactly right. But you know the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out. Somebody's going to get hurt by it.

According to JD Vance, the cause of two assassination attempts against Donald Trump is the fact that Trump has properly been identified as a fascist and a domestic enemy. Vance called for a “reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric:”

We cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist, and if he’s elected, it is gonna be the end of American democracy.

Somehow, according to Vance, Trump is immunized from the blowback that his 10 years of violent rhetoric, incitements and threats have wrought.

Let us be clear about something regarding Trump that makes him very special in the story of America. No president has ever run for office promising to wage war against Americans who dared to oppose him. Though much of the national media doesn’t understand that Trump’s calls for retribution and revenge nullify the need for VP Harris to delineate the particulars of line 23b, clause C of her tax proposal, the American people should appreciate that Trump is targeting us. Because he has been targeted by an assassin twice does not change the fact that he is a malevolent man, leading a worse cause, filled with dangerous loons who want power, control and the ability to take away rights from all of the people that their sick ideology has determined are “less than.”

Gerald Ford, a good man, survived two assassination attempts three weeks apart in 1975.

Harry Truman, a good man, survived two assassination attempts during his presidency.

Adolf Hitler, the most evil man in history, survived 47 assassination plots and multiple attempts. None of those attempts made the murderous Führer virtuous.

Donald Trump is America’s greatest victim — just ask him. His cult of personality has long worshipped Donald Trump as divine, and all of us have been subjected to a decade-long narcissistic display that never lets up. For the next 49 days Trump’s malevolence will increase, as will his bluster, threats and incoherence. It is fair to say that he has substantially unraveled since the first attempt. There should be little doubt about the pace quickening after the second one.

The calls by Trump supporters, including the ubiquitous and odious Elon Musk calling for the targeting of VP Harris (yes, this is exactly what it was ), have put a cross hair on her. Please remember that only one party is filled with people at the most elite levels dreaming of political murder — and none of them are Democrats. The Democratic Party doesn’t have a version of Stephen Miller fantasizing about murdering defenseless people in the Oval Office in front of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

During recent weeks, I have warned about the coming chaos. It is arriving, and it will worsen. The bill is coming due. The only way to stop the inferno is to douse the flames in 49 days. No one is coming to help us. We must save ourselves from ourselves. It has always been this way in America.

Winston Churchill observed that people get what they deserve in a democracy, which is certainly true. He also pointed out that Americans in the end always do the right thing after exhausting all of the other options. Tucker Carlson thinks Churchill was the villain of World War II when most people appreciate that it was Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini.

Churchill was a great champion of freedom. I just hope he was right about America.

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