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It is one thing to grieve the election of a president many consider inappropriate to the office. But it is quite another to call for the murder of a sitting U.S. president.
For the second time this year, rapper Snoop Dogg has parodied the murder of President Donald Trump. Posting the cover of his new album on Instagram—“Make America Crip Again”—Dogg stands insouciantly over a corpse wrapped in the American flag, identified with a toe tag that reads “Trump.” The rapper says the image is “not a statement or a political act,” but “something that’s missing. . . . I’m trying to fill a void.” Presumably, the death of our president.
For more than two centuries, the election of an American president—the world’s oldest, continual, republican head of state—has proudly demonstrated the orderly and peaceful transfer of power and authority. As President Ronald Reagan remarked in his first inauguration, “Few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”
Our constitutional republic endures because we understand no matter who wins the greatest prize in our political system, we all agree to accept the outcome. Yes, we protest, we argue, and we criticize, but in the end, without a bullet fired, we know we must accept the final verdict.
We accept it because, as Americans, we have entered into a solemn covenant with our government, which, by our consent, protects our individual rights and is answerable to an objective moral law. This sacred pledge is built on the unassailable political principle that no person may use force or the threat of force against another person.
Once force bends others to one’s will, then we have abandoned reason and violated the very rights we cherish so dearly—a condition that leaves man powerless and at the hands of brutes with no moral standard of judgment.
Enter the left’s yearlong “resistance” to President Trump, the Republican Party, and their supporters.
This Is Something Else Altogether
It is one thing to grieve the election of a president considered by many to be crude, unfit, and inappropriate to the office—even to demand recounts, question the Electoral College system, boycott the inauguration, slow-walk Cabinet appointments, blockade legislation, create a deep state “shadow government,” threaten impeachment, and mobilize an army of agitators to sabotage an administration.
But it is quite another to call for the murder of a sitting U.S. president.
Notwithstanding others in the celebrity wing of the Democratic Party—Johnny Depp, Madonna, Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin, the cast of New York City’s Public Theater, et. al., all of whom have also made allusions for harm to come to President Trump—it wasn’t until August 17, 2017, when Democratic Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal wrote on her Facebook page, “I hope Trump is assassinated,” that the resistance movement took on an alarming, much more ominous tenor.
In one outrageous, traitorous act—an elected official inciting, promoting, and supporting the killing of a duly elected president—Chappelle-Nadal violated her sacred public trust, usurped the power of government, and became a mob of one. Chappelle-Nadal quickly deleted the post, but it was too late.
When condemnation and calls for her resignation came loudly and swiftly from both sides of the aisle—demands she initially refused (“There’s no way in hell that I’m resigning”) and defied with a flurry of contemptible tweets and weak invocations of the First Amendment—Chappelle-Nadal grudgingly admitted, “I made a mistake.”
I’m So Sorry, But I Can’t Stop Posting
But the chorus of opposition didn’t stop, and Chappelle-Nadal was forced to see the light and seek contrition. “President Trump, I apologize to you and your family,” she said, and went on to apologize to Missourians and to her colleagues in the Missouri state legislature—ironically, some of the same black politicians she once called “house slaves.”
She also revealed that she was on a mission from God: “The message that has been sent to me by our God is that I’m here to serve as a teacher, as a translator, but most of all as a servant. I am a servant of God and I am a servant of the people I represent.”
In September, the Missouri Senate formally condemned Chappelle-Nadal by a vote of censure, which officially reprimanded her conduct, publicly expressed disappointment in her actions, and left the door open to expel her at a later date. Yet, in October, freshly repentant and right with God, Chappelle-Nadal couldn’t help tweeting doctored photos of President Trump morphing into Adolf Hitler.
Then there’s U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, one of the putative “important voices” in the Democratic Party. At a recent gala for LGBT youth, she remarked, “Wow, what a moving evening this is. I’m sitting here listening, thinking, watching, absorbing . . . And with this kind of inspiration, I will go and take out Trump tonight.”
This drew the requisite enthusiastic applause, and Waters basked in her 79-year-old badass, revolutionary persona. Waters has since rejected the implication that she meant to do harm to President Trump, saying she was referring to her efforts to impeach him, not kill him.
This Is an Invitation to Anarchy
In reality, the trajectory of America’s ugly temper and violent intolerance since the 2016 presidential election is fast reaching critical mass. Chappelle-Nadal and Waters are only the canaries in the mineshaft. Their clarion calls to seek Democratic retribution for Hillary Clinton’s crushing defeat lead to the looming larger issue: the Left’s insistent march towards national anarchy.
Philosophers have said that cultures, like people, have a sense of life, a kind of emotional undercurrent that fuels and reflects a society’s prevailing moral principles and acts as a recurring theme of a particular age. Today in America, we are living in the Age of Tribalism, and its dominant emotional atmosphere is revenge.
As our national identity gives way to tribal politics—with smaller and smaller groups, each with its own history, truths, emblems, rights, territories, even sources of communication to convey its views and demands—we are witnessing the erosion of our founding principles and the fraying of the fabric of our society.
The Left and their tribes don’t desire America’s values, they want collectivist ones. They don’t want Americans to keep the rewards of capitalism, they want to take them and redistribute them. They don’t believe in individual rights, they believe in group rights. They don’t want President Trump to succeed or even to fail. They just want him to die.
This article originally appeared in The Federalist.
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Russell Paul La Valle is the former Director of Marketing and Production, as well as a Contributing Editor for the Atlas Society. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Village Voice, Newsday, NY Daily News, American Thinker, Playboy, The Federalist, and The Daily Caller, among other publications. He is currently an opinion contributor for The Hill. In addition, Mr. La Valle has written several cable movies that have appeared on HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and The Movie Channel—and is the author of the novel Underground Dreams. https://russellpaullavalle.com/
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