Friday on CNN’s The Lead, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) stated that “fear and hatred that is dividing us, pitting us against each other” is a danger to democracy and that “it’s targeted at Republicans, Democrats, far right, far left, and local-level officials.”
Dingell stated, “The fear and hatred that is dividing us, pitting us against each other in this country is a real and present danger to our democracy. And I don’t want to see this against anybody, and it isn’t Democrats that this is just targeted at. It’s targeted at Republicans, Democrats, far right, far left, and local-level officials. School board members are wearing bulletproof vests to meetings. This is a real danger, and it’s got to stop.”
Fact check: despite her effort to sound fair and balanced, a rarity among her fellow Party members, the side driving the fear and hatred is the Democrats. If indeed some school board members, for example, are wearing bulletproof vests to meetings, it’s not because they have legitimate reason to fear being shot by concerned parents, but to ratchet up the hysteria against those parents who are outraged by the school board members’ divisive, secretive, leftist indoctrination of the children in their schools. The vast, vast majority of political hate speech and violence flows from Left to Right; it’s not a balance.
Dingell added, “I think that there’s enough [vitriol] coming from everybody on certain days, that every elected public official has got a responsibility to stand up to violence, to try to bring down the temperature and to make it very clear that what happened today, but what’s happening every day in our communities, with people being pitted against each other, isn’t okay.”
She’s right: every public official does have a responsibility to stand up to the violence — especially Democrat officials.