It’s hard to know if it’s more delusion or deception, but the media are again blaming President Trump for violence, this time after a Republican congressional candidate got physical with a reporter. Of course, the media’s accusation is much like Planned Parenthood or the MS-13 gang blaming George Zimmerman for our nation’s diminishing respect for life.

Fake-news outlet the Washington Post is a case in point, currently running an article titled “The GOP inherits what Trump has wrought.” The paper opines, “The angry forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party.”

“When GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter who had attempted to ask him a question Wednesday night in Montana,” the Post continues, “many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are ‘the enemy of the people.’ Nonetheless, Gianforte won Thursday’s special election to fill a safe Republican seat.”

Yes, “many saw” because many see what they want to see. Of course, it’s no surprise that the media have glommed onto the Gianforte incident; not only does it serve their ends, but it’s a man-bites-dog story. The media’s selective memory is striking, however.

While conservative violence is relatively rare, the only people as bad as the violent liberals making headlines the past year have been those who didn’t make headlines (because they weren’t covered). And the kicker is that the media have stoked much of this violence.

It’s possible the two Post writers, Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa, didn’t hear about it (fake-news people associate with other fake-news people), but anti-jihadism crusader Robert Spencer was poisoned by an Icelandic leftist earlier this month. He survived and blames the attack on media propaganda, which has relentlessly portrayed him as a “racist” while omitting mention of what he actually believes.

Then there was Democrat House candidate Mark Wicklund, who was arrested last year for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer (perhaps he should have followed Trump’s lead — Trump is a teetotaler). The media, drunk on leftism, also chose not to give this story the ink they’ve devoted to the Gianforte incident.

Of course, Gianforte’s dust-up with the reporter appears to have been mischaracterized, has been apologized for, and was unplanned. Yet the same cannot be said of the 2016 Democrat scheme to incite violence at Trump rallies. Democrat operative Scott Foval explained the methods — on hidden camera — in the video below. In an operation allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton, Foval admits that they even paid mentally ill people to instigate trouble and proclaimed, “We’re starting anarchy here.”

Warning: This video contains obscene language.

Speaking of anarchy brings us to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, now a Democrat standard bearer dubbed “Auntie Maxine.” She called the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which cost 58 lives and took place in her city, a “rebellion” and “somewhat understandable, if not acceptable”; she also refused to denounce the savage attack on Reginald Denny, a man rioters beat to within an inch of his life only because of the color of his skin (white). Below is a video of commentator Tucker Carlson exposing Waters’ history of bigotry.

Then there’s Yvette Felarca, a California middle-school teacher and leader of the left-wing group By Any Means Necessary. She has taken credit for “shutting down” (her euphemism for violent action) social commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, referring to how violent protesters — who broke windows, threw rocks, hurled incendiary devices at police and set fires — prevented him from giving a Feb. 1 UC Berkeley speech. In the Feb. 13 Tucker Carlson Tonight video below, she’s shown attacking an apparently peaceful protester in the street, as she labels Yiannopoulos and others “fascists.”

Note that in what’s becoming a pattern, other conservative figures, such as Ann Coulter and social scientist Charles Murray, have also been prevented from speaking on college campuses by violent protesters.

Again courtesy of Carlson, we’re introduced to attorney Kevin Zeese, co-director of leftist group Popular Resistance. Carlson said during a recent interview, and Zeese did not disagree, that the organization has the goal of “making this country ‘ungovernable until President Trump leaves office.’”

Popular Resistance has associated itself with the violent Occupy Wall Street movement, even once calling itself “Occupy Washington, DC.” Note also that its name is reminiscent of the “Popular Front,” the left-wing group that controlled Spain for much of the 1930s and which helped spark the Spanish Civil War.

In the video below, Zeese would not denounce the recent left-wing violence; in typical “ends justify the means” style, all he would say is that he didn’t know if it was “effective.”

Then, breaking new ground in political depravity, Democrat politicians have actually been leading vulgar chants such as “F*** Donald Trump!” No less a personage than Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez now casually uses profanity in his stump speeches, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) followed suit in a recent magazine profile.

This makes the 2006 film Idiocracy sadly prophetic (and it took only a decade), as it portrays a dumbed-down, dystopian American future in which intellectually degraded politicians use profanity reflexively. And how low we’ve sunk. Note that in a 1776 general order, George Washington inveighed against profanity, calling it a “foolish, and wicked practice” and “a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.”

One man without sense and character, apparently, is outgoing California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton. In the below video he is shown leading a “F*** Donald Trump!” chant, at California’s Democratic Party convention in Sacramento, as he and most of the attendees hold up two middle fingers (House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] is present, seen on the far right). Ironically, “Sacramento” means the “Sacraments”; perhaps cursing is now a new liberal one.

Warning: This video includes obscene language and gestures.

What’s so tragic about this behavior is that — just as Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties helped define deviancy downwards — it coarsens society. Did these leftists, who sometimes sell proposals as being “for the children,” think at all of the example they’re setting for them?

But violent rhetoric and action have always characterized the Left. In 2012, certain liberals wanted to kill a cute six-year-old boy who expressed anti-Obama sentiments in a video. In 2013, such miscreants expressed support for Christopher Dorner, who murdered innocent people in leftism’s name. Town Hall presented 15 more cases of violent leftist rhetoric here, a prime example being, “‘F*** God D****d Joe the God D****d Motherf*****]g plumber! I want Motherf*****]g Joe the plumber dead.’ — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.”

It should now be apparent how comical it is to portray the Gianforte incident as a new American political low inspired by President Trump’s behavior. As for the media, they doth protest too much. They’ve instigated much of the violence by suppressing the truth, spreading lies (e.g., Black Lives Matter propaganda) and fomenting unrest. They’re clearly upset about being called out, but richly deserve the contempt in which Trump and millions of Americans hold them.

They and the rest of the Left also should know that if they want serious conflict, they should stay their evil course. For civil war can be the ultimate result of a breakdown of — and the breaking down of — civility.

Photo of fire set during Berkeley protests: AP Images