Conservative author Mark Steyn tied Wednesday’s attempted assassinations of Republican congressmen to the preference of many on the left to “dehumanize” their political opponents, instead of engaging in honest debate with them.

“The left wants to denormalize and dehumanize, to use your words, its political opposition,” Steyn told Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson on Fox News Wednesday night. “They do that in a variety of ways. For example, when Charles Murray wants to give a speech at Middlebury College, they have to have a riot. They don’t have a debate in which they demolish his arguments. They don’t want to win the debate. They want to prevent the debate from taking place.” (RELATED: Leftist Students Physically Assault Conservative Scholar, Professor Over Speech)

“They want to label somebody a hater. If you happen to think that Obamacare is not the best public policy, it is because you want grannies and urchins to die. Once you do that, you’re basically saying, there is no form of civilized political discourse possible with your opponent and the logic of that is that instead to you riot and you beat them up, as they do at Middlebury. You poison them, as happened to Robert Spencer, who is well-known to this network, when he gave a speech in Iceland recently, or you open fire on them. You make politics impossible if you do that,” Steyn said. (RELATED: Shooting At GOP Baseball Practice Latest In Pattern Of Violence Against Republicans)

“There’s a religious quality to the way they approach politics,” Carlson agreed. “Do you notice that?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Steyn. “If you have people like the Southern Poverty Law [Center], which has become fabulously wealthy by labeling everyone they disagree with as a hate group, if you keep calling everybody a hater, and in fact, if your organization calls people haters, you are the hater. I would like to disagree with the tone of what we have heard today, including in the last hour for Martha MacCallum and Brit Hume, when they were talking about unity and will this unity last?”

“Obviously, the unity won’t last because ultimately, Rand Paul has very little that unites him with Bernie Sanders. We don’t actually need unity. We need robust, civilized disunity — people honestly recognizing that they disagree with each other on health care, on immigration, on Islam, on transgender bathrooms, and a bazillion other things, but that doesn’t make the other person a hater. Simply put, the left has to be willing to actually engage in debate with people that disagree with them.”

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