This Comment of the Day on the recent EA post about the unethical, irredeemable embarrassment Rep. Greene is—there have been several of them—by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is sufficiently long and self explanatory that I won’t delay your appreciation of it. Here you go…

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Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a great student of history either. President Lincoln did not agree to a national divorce; he secured the unity of the United States at the great cost of 650,000 human lives.

Personally I am quite uncomfortable about the unity talk I am hearing from politicians. Unity is not an abstraction. Unity does not exist on its own; it has a focus, center, and purpose. Proper unity can only be based on a foundation of truth.

During the Civil War slavery was abolished, and after the Civil War the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment secured rights for the former slaves. The unity that Lincoln restored could only be based on the foundational truth that slavery is evil and has no place in the USA, and that the rights mentioned in founding documents of the USA also apply to the former slaves.

That means that if we need to preserve the unity of the United States we cannot skip the issue of truth, and after the funeral of Charlie Kirk simply go over to the order of the day. The assassination may have a similar political importance as the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks in 1856. The subtitle of the book “The Caning” by Stephen Pulio” is “The Assault That Drove America To Civil War”.

I do not intend to be apocalyptic with all the Civil War references, because I do not believe that we are there yet. And to stay within the marriage metaphor used by MTG in her unintelligent ramblings, I do not believe that the GOP is required to act like the battered wife who meekly returns to her abusive husband. So no kumbaya solution that leaves everything unresolved.

Here is the take from John Daniel Davidson from the Federalist today:

“In the days since Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a radical Antifa terrorist, a refrain has arisen in the corporate press and the political establishment that we must come together, lower the temperature, tone down the rhetoric, and condemn political violence on both sides. In order to have peace, they say, we have to have unity.

But there can be no peace or unity without first telling the truth, and the truth is that both-sides-ism, the polite fiction that the American left and right have a problem with political violence, is a damnable lie — and everyone peddling it is a moral coward.”

So in order for both parties in the nation to be on speaking terms again the following needs to happen:

• 1) The Democrats need to repent, and walk back all the rhetoric about racism, fascism, Nazism and existential threat to democracy they have deployed against Republicans over the last decades.
• 2) The Democrats need to admit that this rhetoric has created a culture of political violence resulting in riots with casualties (such as the BLM riots in 2020), and attempted political assassinations of Steve Scalisi, Justice Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and a successful assassination of Charlie Kirk
• 3) The Democrats need to disavow Antifa, BLM, and all the messages at the social media cheering on the death of Charlie Kirk and assassinating the character of Charlie Kirk.
• 4) Once the Democrats go ahead with 1) 2) and 3) then the Trump administration should openly take responsibility for J6 and accept the election results of 2020.

My expectation is that will not happen.

So here is a second set of options to restore unity on the basis of truth:

• 5) The Democrats and the American people need to be mercilessly reminded of all the lies that the Democrats have spread in the last decades, and the Democrats should be branded as the party of hatred, intolerance, and political violence.
• 6) The American people need to bury the Democrats in the coming elections.

My impression is that the second option is more likely.

The Democrats have made a deal with the devil by aligning their party with hard left radicalism. They are riding a tiger they cannot dismount without being eaten. They have painted themselves in a corner. That is why the messaging of the Democrat politicians after Charlie Kirk’s assassination is so awful.

Assume for a moment that the Democrat party distances itself from Antifa, or BLM, or condemns Hamas and unambiguously supports the existence of the state of Israel. This will lead to a revolt of the hard left radicals, and a possible rift in the party. But if they double down on radicalism they will continue to chase all the sane Democrats out of the party. Both scenarios lead to electoral death.

We will know more after the November elections. Take the scenario where Mamdani wins in New York, and the Republicans win the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, with two relatively moderate candidates. That would be a signal for the Democrats to double down on woke and radical. If in that scenario the midterm elections (2026) and Presidential elections (2028) go the way of woke and radical Democrats we have a bigger problem, comparable to what the UK is facing today, and in which the USA cannot and will not make any claim to being exceptional.