ANALYSIS/OPINION:

With the appalling news of the past few weeks of mobs attempting to harass and intimidate President Trump’s female Cabinet members and staff, the inclination is to believe that this remarkable behavior, so antithetical to American values, is the result of a lack of leadership in the Democratic Party.

Yet, the organized nature of the attacks, combined with liberal political and legacy media rhetoric, makes clear this is not some sort of organic turn of events. Having come from the left, I can tell you everything liberals do is organized around the principle of personalizing, punishing and polarizing; it’s the only thing they know how to do and is a required skill when you can’t persuade people on the details of the issues and have no actual policy solutions.

While some were calling for an end to this classically fascist behavior, Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, decided more mob action would be good. Ms. Waters spoke to a group in Los Angeles and did not call for an end to the menacing; instead, she encouraged it.

Real Clear Politics reported, “She said cabinet members and highly visible Trump enablers should expect harassment at restaurants, gas stations, shopping places, and even their homes, ‘Already you have members of your cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants. We have protesters taking up at their house who are saying, ‘No peace, no sleep. No peace, no sleep …’ Waters finished with a call to action: ‘If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!’ “

The crowd cheered, and slowly the rebukes appeared. Various politicians demanded she apologize and have condemned her remarks, including a milquetoast statement by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

During an interview when asked about her remarks, Ms. Waters doubled down, “I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it’s wrong for what they’re doing on so many fronts,” and then blamed, of course, Mr. Trump.

The problem is the genie is now out of the bottle. All it takes is one unhinged lunatic believing he or she now has permission from a congresswoman to attack people who support Mr. Trump for lives to be ruined or taken.

Consider while Ms. Water’s remarks specified members of the administration, why would the unhinged stop there? Why would someone who’s actually inclined to act on her encouragement think that the permission slip limits them to members of the administration? If the new trend is to attack members of the Trump administration, what’s a person to do when there aren’t any of those creatures in your vicinity? There may instead be the neighbor who voted for Donald Trump, or is a known Republican. Second best, someone might reason, but it’ll do.

During the mob attacks, legacy media also began hammering home the depraved notion that Trump supporters were “Nazis,” helping, through their support of the president, to facilitate the kidnapping of children and concentration camps at the border.

The Hill reported, “MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch on Friday compared people who vote for President Trump to Nazis, saying ‘if you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy.’ He also called on Democrats to make the election a referendum on Trump voters, not the president himself. If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going ‘you here, you here,’ Deutsch said.”

This after just over a year ago a liberal activist attempted to mass murder congressional Republicans at a baseball field in Virginia, seriously injuring five. If it weren’t for the single fact that Rep. Steve Scalise was there that day, with his armed Capitol Police protection, that mass murder would have succeeded.

Since they lost the presidential election of 2016, the American left has thrown off the cloak of civility and resorted to intimidation and violence as their preferred political tactic.

Ivanka Trump. Betsy DeVos. Kirsten Nielsen. Sarah Sanders. Pam Bondi. All have been attacked in public with threatening harassing behavior that easily could have resulted in violence.

Ms. Bondi, the Florida attorney general, was harassed at a movie theater by a mob that, according to her description, tried to goad her and her boyfriend into a physical fight. She also spoke of two other female Florida state Republican officials also being personally harassed.

There was a time when liberals stood against the use of intimidation, harassment and violence against political opponents. The gay, black and women’s civil rights movements were about ending the fascist technique of frightening and intimidating people into retreat and silence. Now it appears George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is more relevant than ever.

In the meantime, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan has called on Ms. Waters to apologize for her call for mob action. One wonders, will he also apologize when more blood is spilled?

• Tammy Bruce, president of Independent Women’s Voice, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.

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