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After yesterday’s horrific attack in Washington, DC, political violence has once again come under the national spotlight. In this case, with the gunman revealed as a Bernie Sanders supporter, the Left has comes under scrutiny from conservatives and the center. Although Sanders was quick to denounce the action in the strongest terms possible, New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor published a piece linking the gunman’s actions to what she calls the “belligerent reputation” of Sanders’s supporters during the Democratic primaries, as well as the rhetoric of the Left more generally. The shooting, she writes, “put a new spotlight on the rage buried in some corners of the progressive left,” pointing to anti-Trump messages posted by the killer on Facebook. She further linked the killer’s own rhetoric to Sanders, citing examples of Sanders calling Trump “the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country” and referring to the “extreme right-wing leadership in the US House and the US Senate.” This line of argument is, of course, extremely spurious. Using one lonely incident to extrapolate a wider trend is obviously questionable. Moreover, Alcindor bases much of her argument on the contested idea of a particularly toxic “Bernie Bro” culture. While there’s no doubt Sanders supporters could be combative or even aggressive online, there’s little proof this was different from the behavior of a certain selection of die-hard supporters of any other candidate on the Internet. As Adam Johnson pointed out, one study found Clinton’s supporters were perceived as much more aggressive online than Sanders’. It also wasn’t exactly hard to find anecdotal evidence of Clinton supporters being aggressive, racist and sexist online, not to mention Trump supporters doing the same. Moreover, the kind of anti-Trump rhetoric used by Sanders and the shooter are as much the domain of centrists and even some on the soft right as progressives and those further left. Furthermore, Alcindor neglects to mention the murderer’s history of domestic violence, or even his belief in the mainstream and widely advanced idea of Trump as a “traitor.” But Alcindor was not the only one. After a presidential campaign that saw the Republican standard-bearer launch verbal attack after verbal attack on Muslims, Mexicans, women, journalists, and others, sometimes explicitly calling for violence against individuals — calls that there were sometimes acted on by his supporters — the Right has unsurprisingly jumped on this incident as evidence that violence is a uniquely left-wing problem. Former Trump right-hand man Roger Stone charged, “This is the climate of hate generated by the MSM and egged on by LibDems hath wrought.” White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested that “Democrats’ dangerous rhetoric contributed” to the shooting. Conservative writer David Horowitz agreed: “Democrat hate speech has consequences.” It was “part of a pattern” of “increasing intensity of hostility on the Left,” said Newt Gingrich. Ann Coulter sent out a link to a website claiming that “Leftists [are] In Denial About The Shooting They Inspired.” “The violence is appearing in the streets, and it’s coming from the Left,” claimed Rep. Steve King. These claims are not new. Conservatives have long been arguing that the rise of political violence is, if not entirely a problem of the Left, at the very least coming from both sides of the spectrum. They would point to incidents like yesterday’s shooting, the various protests that turned violent in Berkeley over the last few months, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting sucker-punched, or Kathy Griffin’s photoshoot involving a fake severed Trump head as examples of the broad left’s turn to unacceptable violence. But even if one were to allow these as examples, it’s become increasingly clear that around the world today the use of violence for political ends has been, and continues to be, overwhelmingly a feature of the Right.