Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was attacked from behind by his neighbor as he was mowing his own lawn (think about that for a minute) in Bowling Green, Kentucky, last Friday. “Senator Paul was blindsided and the victim of an assault. The assailant was arrested and it is now a matter for the police,” said Kelsey Cooper, Sen. Paul’s communications director. Paul suffered five broken ribs, including three displaced fractures. Clearly, that wasn’t very neighborly. And as details slowly emerge, it was worse than that.

The lawyer for Rene Boucher, the neighbor who attacked Paul, claims the dispute that precipitated the attack had nothing to do with politics but was over some “trivial” matter. He insisted, “Senator Paul and Dr. Boucher have been next-door neighbors for 17 years. They are also prominent members of the local medical community and worked together when they were both practicing physicians. The unfortunate occurrence of November 3rd has absolutely nothing to do with either’s politics or political agendas.” Perhaps, but it’s no secret that Paul and his neighbor are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and evidently have not spoken to each other in years.

There is an obvious reason why Boucher’s lawyer would seek to distance his client’s motivation from anything political. If it was political, then Boucher is looking at a federal rather than a state offense, and attacking a U.S. senator “on account of the performance of official duties” carries an 8 to 20 year prison term. At the very least, Boucher faces felony rather than misdemeanor charges due to the severity of the attack.

Irrespective of how this particular incident plays out, the fact that we are questioning if politics was a motive says much about the current state of our national political climate — a political climate in which congressional Republicans are targeted for assassination by a socialist. When Democrats, the mainstream media and popular culture feel entirely justified to regularly and falsely paint Republicans and conservatives as the party of racists and bigots, when Hillary Clinton labels Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” and when the Left sees no problem resisting and calling for the impeachment of a justly elected president simply because they don’t like him, we have a real problem. This is type of hatred is the result of one side choosing to exploit identity politics. It remains to be seen if Paul’s neighbor was indeed driven by politically fueled hatred, but there is little question that on a national level America has a dangerously growing problem with “progressive” hate.