The Left has often claimed that the rhetoric of conservatives causes violence. For instance, take the false accusations over the years that Sarah Palin incited the Tucson shooting that killed six and left a dozen wounded, including Representative Gabby Giffords, critically so. But when it comes to incidents like the attempted assassination of Steve Scalise (and others) by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Rachel Maddow superfan, the Left and the establishment don’t say much, even when there seems to be a much stronger link between the rhetoric and the violence.

That’s why some recent comments on social media deserve notice. When Joe Biden took cheap shots at Donald Trump and the Republican Party at the G7, Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch, among numerous others, rebuked him. But Matthew Dowd, a former ABC bigwig whose Twitter profile claims “Democrats are only vehicle today to save the Republic,” responded by claiming the GOP is “an antidemocratic entity,” going on to say that “our politics will only be detoxified if the gop [sic] as it currently constituted is gone.” Ron Fournier, formerly an AP “journalist,” added a comment implying that “terrorist-backing, anti-democratic forces” are fair game.

Those social media exchanges only reinforce what we noted when we called out David French, also of The Dispatch, for falsely claiming conservatives were lying when we said the Left hates grassroots Patriots and seeks to silence them. Our commentary in February, when left-wing “national security experts” openly compared the Republican Party to a terrorist cell that would be raided or bombed, also touched on the dangerous rhetoric coming from the Left. While we have said those who broke the law on January 6 should be punished, we also have said that the reckoning needs to extend across the board.

But part of that reckoning includes addressing the past. Grassroots Patriots who have seen themselves smeared as racists (or worse) over the years have every right to question what that rhetoric — and the Republican/conservative establishment’s failure to stand up to it — could lead people to do.

The smears continue, with an accident being falsely portrayed as a terrorist attack, and then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis facing phony claims he enabled it.

Dennis Prager has not been wrong to point out that the constant portrayal of Trump as an illegitimately elected Russian puppet who thought white supremacists were “very fine people” and was an existential threat to democracy could have not just had effects on the 2020 election, including the need to “fortify” it. That rhetoric also probably provoked violence against conservatives as well. Just ask the attendees of this year’s Western Conservative Summit and the journalists who covered it.

When a former media bigwig says the only way to detoxify politics is to wipe out the GOP, and another once-prominent reporter paints Biden’s political opponents as “terrorist-backing, anti-democratic forces,” it’s fair to question whether the Biden administration is scheming to weaponize the Justice Department against political opponents, particularly given the track record of abuses and lies grassroots Patriots have witnessed.

The Left and “Never Trump” types can try to gaslight about “norms and standards” all they want, and they can try to paint grassroots Patriots as paranoid. But the fact is, what comes out of their own mouths and keyboards often prove grassroots Patriots are right to fear what the Left’s hateful rhetoric can lead to — that things won’t stop with a “fortified” election.