REUTERS
The bullet that whizzed through the ear of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Penn., on July 13 was fired by a shooter with apparently leftist sympathies.
The man who opened fire on Republicans practicing for the Congressional baseball game and nearly took House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s life in 2017 campaigned for Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The transgender perpetrator of the 2023 Nashville school shooting, who murdered three 9-year-olds and three adults at the Presbyterian Covenant School, held a deep hatred for Christianity and said she would “kill” to get puberty blockers.
These aren’t one-off events.
A through-line unites all three harrowing incidents as well as hundreds of others: All emerged amid the extremist hate fomented by America’s progressive left.
One could be forgiven for not making the connection.
The image portrayed in mass media and by the Southern Poverty Law Center — long considered the gold standard for tracking “hate” in the United States — presents violent radicalism as the exclusive domain of the right.
It’s not.
The SPLC’s vaunted “Hate Map” is currently tracking 1,430 “hate and antigovernment groups” across the country.
Everything we know about the Trump assassination attempt
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified as the shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
- The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old retired fire chief, and injured two other rally-goers.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he looked for the dates of Trump’s appearances and the Democratic National Convention.
- Crooks’ search history also revealed a broad interest in high-profile people and celebrities, regardless of their political affiliation, FBI officials reportedly said.
- Trump exclusively recounted surviving the “surreal” assassination attempt with The Post at the rally, remarking, “I’m supposed to be dead.”
- High-profile politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it “a heinous, horrible and cowardly act.”
At first glance, the number is staggering — but a deeper look reveals it to be inflated.
Among the 1,430 are all 310 nationwide chapters of the parental rights group Moms for Liberty.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-liberty organization that has argued — and won — cases before the US Supreme Court, also features on the SPLC’s map, along with the Family Research Council, a traditional-values advocacy group.
The latter was itself the target of leftist violence in 2012, when a radicalized LGBTQ activist opened fire in the lobby of FRC headquarters in Washington, DC.
The attacker shot and injured the building’s security guard, but the carnage could have been far worse — the assailant came armed with 50 rounds of ammunition and 15 Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear on his dead victims’ faces.
Here’s the latest on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
- Newly surfaced texts show Trump rally gunman was on authorities’ radar more than 90 minutes before shooting: report
- FBI to conduct victim interview with Donald Trump after assassination attempt
- Trump promises more outdoor rallies despite Secret Service warning after assassination attempt
- Ex-Trump doc says FBI’s Wray is ‘wrong’ to doubt ex-prez was struck by bullet: ‘Absolutely no evidence’
- Trump defends female Secret Service agent who was criticized after assassination attempt: ‘So brave’
When asked by law enforcement why FRC was in his crosshairs, the gunman replied, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online.”
It’s a sad decline and a far cry from the SPLC’s message at the time of its 1971 founding, when it formed to rightfully condemn legitimately hateful domestic terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
“Time and again, I see the SPLC using the reputation it gained decades ago fighting the Klan as a tool to bludgeon mainstream politically conservative opponents,” Cornell professor and SPLC critic William Jacobson told Politico in 2017.
In fact, in all its history, the SPLC has never put a left-wing group on its Hate Map.
Such an abdication of duty and abandonment of mission isn’t just dishonest; it’s dangerous.
By giving the veneer of objectivity but focusing only on one side of the equation, the SPLC allows hate on the left to go unmonitored and unchecked.
That ends now.
This week, the New Tolerance Campaign launched our own Hate Map project, cataloging individuals and organizations on the left that are inspiring and often directly engaging in physical violence against those with whom they disagree.
There is no shortage of source material.
Antifa militants in 2020 nearly killed conservative blogger Chad Nesbitt in North Carolina, and in 2019 another Antifa-led assault in Portland, Ore., left journalist Andy Ngo with a bleeding brain.
In Atlanta, 23 Antifa activists were arrested and charged with terrorism following a January 2023 riot in which they threw “rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police.”
The same faction also attempted to storm CNN headquarters on June 27 with the goal of shutting down the network’s presidential debate.
The vicious attacks against Jewish students that rocked college campuses in the spring were entirely the product of the left.
In May, Students for Justice in Palestine hunted Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York who barricaded themselves in the school library to escape their harassers.
SJP is facing a lawsuit alleging it’s a “propaganda and recruiting wing” for Hamas terrorists.
Radical transgender crusaders are on record condoning “any and all violence” against TERFs (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists) for the transgression of believing in biological sex and women’s-only spaces.
Climate extremists such as Earth First promote “ecological resistance” — that is, industrial sabotage — that destroys private property and puts lives in danger.
One thing is clear: the left in America has a hate problem.
The first step to ending it is calling it out.
Gregory T. Angelo is president of the New Tolerance Campaign.