“Few people know what a great man and leader Shinzo Abe was, but history will teach them and be kind.” So said former President Donald Trump of the former Japanese prime minister, who was assassinated earlier today, apparently with a homemade gun.

“He was a unifier like no other,” said Trump, “but above all, he was a man who loved and cherished his magnificent country, Japan. Shinzo Abe will be greatly missed. There will never be another like him!”

Joe Biden was apparently “stunned, outraged and deeply saddened,” but these seem like crocodile tears to us. Abe, after all, was a conservative and had an especially warm relationship with Trump. When certain weak-kneed world leaders kept their distance from the United States during Trump’s term in office, Abe did just the opposite: He forged strong personal ties with the American president, and the bond was clearly mutual.

To Biden’s credit, though, “stunned, outraged and deeply saddened” are five more words than he ever said about the recent attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Abe, 67, was the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history and a staunch friend of the United States. And while we don’t yet know much about the motivations of his assassin, we can’t help but think Abe’s politics had something to do with it. He was a proud and unapologetic conservative. Or, as they like to say in the lying, bought-off, agenda-driven mainstream media, “a divisive arch-conservative.”

That’s what black-hearted, taxpayer-funded NPR called him in a despicable and since-deleted tweet before settling on the term “ultranationalist,” which we suppose is similar to those they refer to here in the U.S. as “ultra-MAGA.” As Fox News reports:

NPR’s report on Abe’s death smeared the former leader, painting him in a highly negative political light to its liberal-leaning audience. In their initial tweet on the story, it wrote, “Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a divisive arch-conservative and one of his nation’s most powerful and influential figures, has died after being shot during a campaign speech Friday, in western Japan, hospital officials said.” The tweet received major backlash from conservatives on the platform, causing the outlet to delete it and post a new version, which referred to Abe as an “ultranationalist.”

Your tax dollars at work.

As we noted in the wake of the attempted Kavanaugh assassination, and as our Mark Alexander has thoroughly catalogued, political violence occurs almost exclusively on the Left, and it seems to be growing more popular.

Recently, on the fifth anniversary of the near-assassination of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise and others by a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter, our Emmy Griffin explored the growing threat of leftist political violence. “With this deepening of the political divide has come an uptick in violence,” she writes, “which is not spread evenly across the political parties.” She then went on to rattle off the evidence — from the aforementioned attack on Republican congressmen, to the deadly George Floyd riots, to the black supremacist who mowed down seven Christmas revelers in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to another black supremacist attack at a New York City subway station, to the firebombing of pregnancy resource centers, and to the narrowly averted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh.

The common theme to all these attacks? A dismissive mainstream media, which seems only interested in covering the show trial of January 6, 2021.

Unless and until we hear otherwise, we’ll consider the Abe assassination another example of leftist violence. The Leftmedia will, of course, do its best to downplay any political motivation behind his murder, but we don’t think it’s a coincidence. Abe was not only a conservative; he was a deeply popular one — perhaps the most popular leader in post-war Japanese history.

May Shinzo Abe rest in peace. And may we here in the U.S. begin to wake up and take seriously the very real threat of leftist political violence.

UPDATED to include additional analysis of political violence from the Left.