The tragic shooting of Minnesota lawmakers has prompted Democrats to suddenly speak out against the dangers of heated political rhetoric. And while it’s nice to hear them say the right things for once, their words ring hollow—and deeply hypocritical. These are the same people who’ve spent years fanning the flames.
In fact, there were anti-Trump protests happening nationwide on Saturday, driven by the absurd narrative that Trump is somehow behaving like “a king.”
The irony is lost on them.
"People need to call out people," Sen. Amy Klobuchar declared on CNN's "State of the Union,” on Sunday, adding, "Some people need to look in the mirror and say, 'Hey, I have to stop this, or stop my colleagues from doing this because it makes it much worse.'"
How convenient. Where was this measured approach when Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassin's bullet last year? For years, Democrats accused Trump of being an “existential threat to our democracy,” which naturally inspired two assassination attempts.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Immediately after the July 13 assassination attempt, some Democrats, including Joe Biden, said it was time to cool the temperature down. That’s lasted, what, 15 seconds? Seriously, it took no time at all for Democrats and their media allies to resume their relentless campaign of demonization. They persisted with inflammatory comparisons to Hitler, continued labeling Trump supporters as "fascists," and maintained their apocalyptic warnings about "threats to democracy." The very rhetoric that creates the conditions for political violence remained unchanged.
Klobuchar correctly notes, "We need to bring the tone down, and we need to stand up when people do bad things." Yet this epiphany came only after Democratic lawmakers became targets, not when a Republican president barely escaped death. Now, let’s not kid ourselves: This call for an end to the harsh rhetoric is really about Democrats trying to control the narrative and imply that this is right-wing violence and thus that Trump and Republicans are responsible for what happened. However, the suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was actually appointed by Gov. Tim Walz to serve on a state Workforce Development Board as a private-sector representative, and his wife, Jennifer, interned for Walz when he was a member of Congress. Boelter’s abandoned fake police vehicle contained “No Kings” flyers and a manifesto that reportedly contained a kill list of both Democrat and Republican public officials.
Yet, Klobuchar doesn’t want to talk about that. Instead, she referred to the suspect's reported anti-abortion views as being a potential motive—despite having no evidence to support that claim, since the manifesto hasn’t been released yet. According to reports I’ve seen on social media, Boelter was a Catholic -- and may have been a pro-life leftist for all we know. It happens, yet Democrats like Klobuchar are desperately trying to push the idea Boelter was a “MAGA extremist.”
Democrats aren’t interested in dialing back political rhetoric—they’re trying to hijack the narrative and use it as yet another weapon against Trump and the GOP. After the first assassination attempt on Trump, they had a rare opportunity for self-reflection. They could’ve admitted that calling your political opponents “Hitler” for years can have real-world consequences. They could’ve acknowledged that leadership means exercising restraint, even in tense political moments. But they didn’t.
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Instead, Joe Biden had the audacity to sit in the Oval Office after the attempt on Trump’s life and lecture Americans about “lowering the temperature”—without a single nod to how reckless and dehumanizing Democrat rhetoric has become. He mentioned January 6, the attack on Paul Pelosi, and the supposed plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. But curiously absent? The 2017 congressional baseball shooting, the BLM riots that torched cities in 2020, and the leftist attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. According to Biden, only Republicans are guilty of overheated rhetoric, and only Trump and the MAGA movement need to chill out.
And the Democrats fell right in line. They didn’t skip a beat. No self-awareness, no change in tone. They just kept pounding the same drum, spewing the same inflammatory talking points that make political violence not just possible—but inevitable. Because to them, violent rhetoric is only a problem when it’s not aimed at Republicans.
And naturally Klobuchar wants the state to get involved. She is calling for new laws to "crack down on online activity that stokes political violence.” It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is just a ruse to censor conservative speech.
I’m sick of this.
Klobuchar and her friends in the Democratic Party need to stop pretending they have the moral high ground on political rhetoric. If they really cared, they’d examine their own party's contribution to the toxic political environment that has made such violence increasingly common. True leadership means taking responsibility for your own rhetoric before demanding others change theirs.
The tragedy in Minnesota should serve as a wake-up call for all elected officials. But it rings hollow coming from Democrats who had their chance to lead by example and chose partisan advantage instead.
