Congresswoman Maxine Waters (Screenshot)

“I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them.”

These words weren’t written in a novel from some evil villain, hell-bent on destroying a politician’s life. They weren’t said in a movie where the FBI or CIA track down some domestic terrorist.

They were allegedly said by a man named Laurence Wayne Key, from Florida. The target were the children of House Representative Brian Mast, Republican.

The motive? Purely political: Key continued, allegedly calling Mast’s office, “If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” It’s an ironic twist of fate that he would be worried about the children of illegal aliens, since he volunteered at a local Planned Parenthood for much of his time. Of course, maybe that explains everything. Apparently, to Key, killing children is no different from killing a fly.

Senator Rand Paul was assaulted by his next door neighbor, not for the way he trimmed his hedges, but for his conservatism.

Last week, the congresswoman Maxine Walters called for leftists to get out and “create a crowd, and you push back on them [the Trump administration]. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” She claimed she did not urge them to do violence, but does anybody doubt she in fact was?

Can anyone forget the ugly and twisted look on the face of the female college professor, calling for some “muscle” to get rid of someone she disagreed with? On a public campus?

Such is the modern Democratic and liberal party, where violence trumps dialogue, where calls for the heads of politicians and their kin are more than just words, they’re actual threats.

You could write a book on the violence of liberalism, going back centuries. The French Revolution of the 1780s, which saw the overthrow of the near millennium-old monarchy, quickly turned from a noble cause, inspired by the success of the American Revolution, to a violent slaughter. The appropriately-named Reign of Terror saw the deaths of nearly 17,000 people in one year’s time. Anyone remotely suspected of being a Loyalist, or even not actively supporting the Revolution, were sentenced to death: beheading, hanging, drowning, any means to silence the non-revolutionary cause. Catholic nuns and priests, seen as nothing more than the religious elite and arm of the French Crown, were murdered. Some of them fled, especially to the newly-formed United States of America, which looked at the bloodshed with horror from such a recent ally. Leader Maximilien Robespierre saw nothing wrong with it: “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice,” he said.

Fast forward, and the Reign of Terror continued in other left-leaning countries. The Soviet Union, the supposed beacon of communism and workers’ rights, where the dictatorship of the proletariat was to rule over the dictatorship of the bourgeoise, was directly responsible for millions of deaths. All for “counter-revolutionary” activities, which included anything from criticizing the state to worshipping an unsanctioned god (which was them all; in an atheistic society, there is no god except the State). Joseph Stalin, the paranoid madman, personally saw to the Great Purge, killing his own officials and about a million others deemed undesirable. Though the worst was behind them, the policies of the Soviet Union more or less continued until its dissolution in 1991. Millions, sometimes for the most mundane reasons, or no reason at all, were tried in a kangaroo court and shipped off to gulags, places where no human was to live, for slave labor. If you didn’t meet your quota for the day, you had a cut in your already-depleted rations, which, ultimately, made you lose your quota again, which saw a further depletion. The so-called “workers’ paradise” hardly seemed that way for its inhabitants. Socialist countries around the world – Cuba, Venezuela, China, the Iron Curtain states, you name it – had this same procedure: arrest, jail, execute anyone who dare criticized the communist state or ideology.

And we know all about Hitler, the National Socialist, who institutionalized violence against anyone who earned his ire to an art form, at least in Nazi Germany.

But hey, nothing like that can happen here, right?



Well, blame it on the President himself, the rise of anti-intellectualism, the “me generation” and obsession of victimization, but it certainly can. Antifa, the band of hooligans, justify their own vandalism, their own assault on persons and rights, for their “anti-fascist” ideology. Wherever they were, so too were riots. Graffiti at the University of California, Berkeley College appeared everywhere: “Kill Trump” was one of the more prominent messages displayed on buildings.

A history lesson for any members of Antifa reading this: If your protests end up looking more like Kristallnacht in 1938, then you aren’t “anti-fascists” at all.

Let’s face it, most liberals are perpetually dyspeptic, perpetually unhappy that the world is not following their edits. Deep down, they know collectivist is a failed ideology, which makes them even more angry.

Let’s list other instances of American “tolerant” liberalism through the decades. There’s Lee Harvey Oswald, the failed Soviet asylum seeker and murderer of President John Kennedy. There’s the eco-terrorists like the Unabomber, the antiwar Weathermen, responsible for bombings, including the U.S. Capitol in February 1971. There’s James Hodgkinson, who attempted to murder on a beautiful June day several Republican congressmen, nearly killing Steve Scalise. He had been a crazed supporter of Bernie Sanders (is there any other kind?) so it was no secret what his motives were. There’s Floyd Lee Corkins, who in 2012, taking his cue from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation, broke into the Family Research Council, guns blazing. And now there’s Maxine Waters, who said the following: “[I]f you see anybody from that cabinet [the Trump administration] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Both individual and state-sponsored terrorism and murder and violence is nothing new, but there’s something to be said when an ideology places the collective over the individual. To place the group before the individual is to deny the humanity of the person, where the means of achieving a “utopia” is justified. Violence, murder, slave labor – all is right in the collectivists’ minds.

Craig Shirley is a presidential historian and author of four bestsellers on President Ronald Reagan, his latest being “Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980.” He also has a political biography on Newt Gingrich, “Citizen Newt.” Scott Mauer is Craig Shirley’s researcher.

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