Think about it for a minute.
If you've been listening to mainstream media sources lately, you'd hear pleas for civility and proper discourse in the wake of last week's horrific shooting at a ball field in Alexandria, Virginia, that resulted in critical injuries for Rep. Steve Scalise.
But if you've been tuning into conservative media outlets, you'd pick up some calls for retaliation and retribution. To them, the shots fired by James T. Hodgkinson, a man who the FBI said acted alone, were "the first shots of the second American civil war."
Granted, those words came from noted conspiracy theorist and overt Donald Trump supporter Alex Jones (a man who's no stranger to hyperbole), but a list of some of the biggest names on the right side of the aisle shows that conservatives are trying to play up the attack as much as possible. Jones isn't all in on Civil War analogies. He's also a fan of Revolutionary War analogies, having compared Donald Trump to George Washington:
Because if you let one ant stand up, they might all stand up, and those little ants outnumber the parasites 1,000 to one. If they want a war, let's let them have it. Now they're getting their ass kicked in the economy, your approval ratings are going up. Sir, they don't care. They're going to intimidate and pay off and roll people in your second-level operation to try to burn you. You must go on the offense. This is war. You think George Washington kicked the redcoats' ass just with information? No.
Michael Savage also said he believed there was "going to be a civil war."
The dangerous escalation of rhetoric has turned up on Fox Business Network, where Lou Dobbs said the "secular left . . . has become a threat to domestic order."
But consider this: This rhetoric started long before a disturbed man opened fire in Virginia.
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