Democrats Get Amnesia on Party’s History of Political Violence

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, frauds like former president Barack Obama disingenuously claim that “we don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” In reality, we do know – and we know that his killing is just the latest manifestation of Democrat-induced political violence that has been a mainstay in our country since 1856.

That was the year Democrat Representative Preston Brooks attacked and nearly killed Republican Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sumner—a founding member of the Republican Party—incurred the wrath of Brooks when he denounced the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery Democrats who had invaded from Missouri. This was a precursor to the Civil War, which began when eleven Democrat-dominated states formed the “Confederate States of America,” elected Democrat Jefferson Davis as its President, and fired on Fort Sumter.

After more than 600,000 Americans died in that war, the Democrats continued their tradition of violence by forming paramilitary groups to terrorize and kill black voters who attempted to cast ballots for Republicans. The most notorious of these was the KKK, of course, which was led by Democrat politician turned Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. The KKK specialized in murdering Republican politicians, including Republican Rep. James M. Hinds of Arkansas, the first U.S. Congressman to be assassinated while in office.

President Abraham Lincoln was, of course, murdered by John Wilkes Booth three years earlier. Corporate media “fact checkers” and online misinformation sites like Wikipedia have in recent years desperately attempted to revise history to conceal Booth’s political affiliation. FactCheck.org, for example, falsely identified him as a member of the Know-Nothing Party, but that party ceased to exist ten years before he shot Lincoln—when Booth was 15 years old. Booth was a Democrat, plain and simple.

The next president to be assassinated was Republican James Garfield, who was shot by Charles Guiteau in 1881. As with Booth, there has been an obvious attempt to conceal Guiteau’s affinity for the Democrats. Hilariously, Wikipedia lists his political affiliation as “Liberal Republican” while contradicting that claim in its biographical write-up: “Guiteau took an interest in politics and identified with the Democratic Party.” In 1872, he voted for Horace Greeley, who ran on the Democrat presidential ticket against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant – a hated figure amongst Democrats for his role in winning the Civil War and forming the Department of Justice to protect black civil rights and snuff out the first rendition of the KKK.

The third president to be assassinated was Republican William McKinley. (Does anyone detect a pattern here yet?) McKinley was shot in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, whose biography has also been scrubbed clean of any reference to the Democrats. Depending on the source, he is variously described as a socialist, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and even a disgruntled McKinley voter. A simple internet search on that incongruous claim produced the following result: “Yes, Leon Czolgosz did vote for William McKinley in the 1896 election, but he later became disillusioned.”

Other Republican presidents who have survived assassination attempts include Theodore Roosevelt, (1912), Gerald Ford (1975), Ronald Reagan (1981), and Donald Trump (2024) – all Republicans. Their would-be assassins, we are told by “historians,” were all loners with murky motivations. Similar claims have been made about James Hodgkinson, who opened fire on GOP congressmen who were practicing for a baseball game and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) in 2017, and now Tyler Robinson who has been charged with killing Charlie Kirk.

Here’s a hint on their motives: They all shot Republicans.

Of course, some Democrats have been targets of political violence – most famously President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy. But on the whole, it is clearly Republicans who have borne the brunt of assassination efforts.

As Jesus of Nazareth put it, “You shall know them by their fruit.” This brings us back to Barack Obama and his claim that violence has no place in our democracy. The truth is that he and countless other Democrats have deliberately normalized violence against Republicans with irresponsible rhetoric. Obama, you will recall, described GOP voters as bitter people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” It is no coincidence that Hillary Clinton described Trump supporters as “deplorable” and Joe Biden characterized them as “garbage.”

The point of such rhetoric is to dehumanize their political opponents and their supporters. This is why Kamala Harris openly called Donald Trump a fascist during her failed presidential bid. If you convince weak-minded people that a politician is dangerous to “our democracy,” it justifies violent action against him. Biden told donors five days before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Even after the first attempt on Trump’s life, former Biden staffer Kate Bedingfield opined on CNN that Democrats should “turn their fire on Donald Trump.”

All of which brings us to Charlie Kirk. He was routinely slandered by Democrats and the corporate media. This poisonous passage from The Nation was published after his death: “He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.” This is typical of how he was regularly described in most “news” outlets and by the same Democrats who now claim to deplore the violent act that cut him down.

There is no doubt that such vitriol incites violence, and that is precisely why Democrats and their accomplices in the corporate media deploy it. Despite the crocodile tears shed by some Democrats when Kirk was murdered, his increasingly successful crusade to persuade young people to seriously consider the merits of conservative ideas was a threat to them, and you can bet they are glad he’s gone. They will continue to live up to their party’s bloody legacy.

David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.