Let’s face it, America: The escalating political violence in our country is a serious problem. We’ve had this problem for a long time, but we haven’t faced up to it, and it’s getting worse by the day. And it’s coming mainly from the Left, not the Right.

The Democrats are trying to regain their footing after their election shellacking, looking for opportunities to “resist.” It began with outrage about Elon Musk’s (their former hero) role in leading Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but almost overnight, that morphed into hideous violence. We’re watching Tesla dealerships and charging stations across the nation being vandalized, shots being fired, and $100,000 vehicles being torched. Private Tesla owners (the ones who took seriously the mandate to save the planet) were doxed. All this is being done with the obvious intent of destroying Musk’s business and intimidating anyone who supports him. It’s domestic terrorism of the first order.

Today’s vandalism is being cheered gleefully — or when not, then tacitly endorsed — by Trump-hating media and Democrat politicians everywhere. For years we listened to the Trump-is-Hitler babble, but now it is the Democrats who are giving the most authentic demonstration of Nazi brownshirt behavior since the real thing in 1935 Berlin.

Remember the ominous warnings from the Biden administration about the imminent threat of domestic terrorism from right-wing extremists? Let’s not forget the concerted effort by the last administration to convince Americans that the Trump-incited January 6 Capitol incursion constituted the single greatest threat to the survival of our Republic since the U.S. Civil War nearly two centuries ago.

But what we’ve been seeing from the Left is not hypothetical; it’s real — angry protests at private homes of Supreme Court justices (including an armed assassin apprehended near Brett Kavanaugh’s home) and disruptive, often violent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic riots popping up across the country, many on the campuses of our most prestigious universities. And let’s not forget two assassination attempts targeting then-candidate Trump.

Those violent incidents pale in comparison to the 2020 “summer of love” — a several-month stretch of anarchy in cities across the nation. The full tally of the more than 500 riots that summer included dozens of deaths, thousands of injuries to police, rampant arson and looting, billions in property damage, and two government facilities (a police precinct and a federal courthouse) invaded, ransacked, and occupied. And for any viewers unwilling to trust their lying eyes, media reporters (often against a backdrop of raging flames) kept characterizing the nightly chaos as “mostly peaceful protest.”

Is any of this really new? Not really. Look back over the decades, and we see it as a continuum of political violence, always simmering and periodically boiling over. In my adult lifetime: the 1965 Watts Riots; the unrest of the late 1960s and into the ‘70s; American cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, etc.) falling victim to similar violent unrest; the Black Panthers; the Helter-Skelter murders; political assassinations; attacks on courtrooms and police; the SDS (“Students for a Democratic Society,” a title that checks multiple boxes); the loony “Occupy” movement; the Ferguson unrest; the birth of Black Lives Matter; the craziness of defunding police; mobs tearing down statues; and the list goes on.

The jackpot question is: WHY?

That’s grist for serious evaluation, but I don’t think it’s really very complicated. Politically motivated violence has taken root in our nation because it is enabled, encouraged, romanticized, applauded, and largely consequence-free. In short, for behavior we supposedly abhor, we’ve done a marvelous job cultivating it.

Our current political violence epidemic snuck up on us because it started for all the right reasons and was conducted in all the right ways. Dr. Martin Luther King, following Ghandi’s example, harnessed the power of nonviolent protest. With amazing courage, King and his followers were steadfast in their nonviolent methods — the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the march to Selma — even when met with violence. They changed our nation forever.

But then we lost Dr. King, and we forgot the nonviolent part; from there, it’s been downhill. The once noble concept of nonviolent protest has now evolved into a cascade of protest for any reason and via any method — an end unto itself. Violence included? Sure, if it might work.

The only way to curtail that intolerable behavior is to hold accountable those who enable it and engage in it. Our government moved mountains to identify, find, arrest, prosecute, and punish those who engaged (even as gawkers) in the three-hour U.S. Capitol riot on 1/6/21. But the deaths and devastation from the hundreds of riots in 2020? Largely ignored, hiding behind the pretext that the nightly violence was somehow necessitated by the menace of racial injustice. Without a doubt, that double standard has been understood, loud and clear, by the perpetrators.

President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi promise to throw the legal book at those responsible for the outrageous and dangerous attacks on Tesla. And the president’s initiative of withholding federal funding from universities that tolerate violent anti-Semitic protests is now getting their attention. Hopefully, that will begin to turn the tide.

Is the ever-escalating political violence in our country solely the work of Democrats? No, but they are certainly in the vanguard. That’s not a partisan hit; it is simply a recognition that over the years, Democrat leadership has consistently turned a blind eye to the “anything goes” approach to registering political disagreement. Today, those leaders all promise energetically to “Fight!” What’s less clear is how they fight and what they are fighting for. In my view, they’d best recalibrate their thinking and tactics if they plan to win back their 2024 defectors.