Disagree with a progressive on taxes or border security and you get branded a fascist. Support conservative policies and suddenly you are Hitler. Criticize the cultural left and you are evil itself. This is not debate. It is not even argument. It is the systematic replacement of political disagreement with moral annihilation - and it has consequences that go well beyond hurt feelings and bad social media threads.

Hyperbole fuels anger. Anger fuels violence. That is not a controversial claim. It is a documented pattern. The question worth asking - the one most commentators skip - is whether years of calling ordinary conservatives Nazis and existential threats to democracy has helped create the environment in which assassination attempts on conservative leaders become a predictable rather than a shocking event. In my opinion, the answer is yes. That does not mean the left pulls the trigger. It means the rhetoric loads the chamber.

Political Violence Is Not a Conservative Monopoly

The media's preferred frame is that January 6th represents the definitive example of American political violence and that the threat flows in one direction. January 6th was a shameful day. That is not in dispute. But to treat it as the only data point while ignoring everything else is not journalism. It is selective memory in service of a narrative.

The summer of 2020 produced riots across dozens of American cities in the wake of George Floyd's death. Businesses were burned, police precincts were torched and the Insurance Information Institute estimated the civil unrest losses as the most expensive in American history. In Portland and Seattle, Antifa factions seized streets, assaulted officers and occupied city blocks for weeks while politicians and media outlets described the situation as largely peaceful. More recently, Tesla vehicles have been targeted and burned by people who decided that destroying private property made a valid political point. Conservative speakers on college campuses routinely require armed security because threats of violence follow their invitations. Simply wearing a red hat in certain cities has been enough to invite assault.

Violence is not the monopoly of any one party or ideology. It emerges wherever hyperbole convinces people that their opponents are less than human and must be stopped by any means necessary. That pattern does not belong to the right or the left. It belongs to whoever is currently most convinced that the other side is a genuine existential threat.

If You Convince People Their Neighbor Is Hitler, Some of Them Will Act Accordingly

Here is the logic that transforms rhetoric into danger. If you genuinely believe your political opponent is a fascist dictator on the order of Adolf Hitler, then violence against that person is not just understandable - it is morally obligatory. Who would not resist a Hitler? Who would not take drastic action to stop a fascist? The hyperbole does not just poison debate. It provides moral cover for people already inclined toward extremism to act on impulse rather than reason.

A gunman opened fire at Trump during a Pennsylvania rally in July 2024. Threats against politicians of both parties have spiked consistently in recent years, as documented by the U.S. Capitol Police. Conservative speakers require security details at events that used to need nothing more than a microphone. None of this happens in a vacuum. It happens after years of mainstream voices - not fringe accounts, mainstream ones - telling millions of people that Republicans are Nazis, that conservatives are fascists and that the other side represents a literal threat to democracy itself.

History Has Seen This Before

The parallels to Weimar Germany between 1919 and 1933 are uncomfortable but instructive. The left and right demonized each other to the point where street violence was normalized and political opponents were routinely described as subhuman enemies of the people. Communists and fascists fought in the streets while propaganda on both sides labeled the other as irredeemably evil. That demonization did not cause the catastrophe that followed by itself. But it created the cultural and psychological conditions in which catastrophe became possible. When one side convinces itself the other is evil incarnate, violence becomes not just excusable but noble. That is exactly the dynamic American political culture is currently running.

America has its own version of this history. In the late 1960s and 1970s, radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground justified bombings, riots and attacks on police under the banner of fighting fascism. They painted America itself as irredeemably evil and concluded that violence was the rational response. Their rhetoric - apocalyptic, exaggerated, hyperbolic - provided moral cover for destruction. Today's Antifa and the more violent factions of BLM echo the same themes with the same logic. The targets change. The reasoning does not.

What Live and Let Live Actually Means

The founders disagreed bitterly on taxes, states' rights, the structure of the federal government and foreign policy. They argued with genuine passion and real stakes. What they did not do - at least in the best of their political tradition - was treat disagreement as evidence of evil. The principle underneath the American experiment is that you can be wrong without being an enemy and that liberty survives not when everyone agrees but when everyone agrees to let others live free.

Live and let live does not mean political passivity. It does not mean tolerating genuine injustice or refusing to argue hard for what you believe. It means recognizing that your neighbor's vote does not make them a monster, that not every policy dispute is fascism or socialism, that speech and conscience and assembly matter even for people you strongly dislike, and that burning buildings and storming institutions is not protest - it is destruction that poisons the very freedoms being claimed in its name.

The cost of abandoning this principle is not abstract. Families split along political lines over disagreements that a generation ago would have been settled at the dinner table. Friendships end because one person applied a label the other could not accept. Communities fracture after riots and the retaliation that follows. Citizens go silent because they know the cost of saying the wrong thing out loud. Political leaders live under genuine threat because millions have been told those leaders are Hitler. None of this is necessary. All of it is preventable. But it requires the willingness to say that the rhetoric has gone too far and that the people primarily responsible for mainstreaming it need to own that.

My Bottom Line

In my opinion it is past time for both sides to drop the hyperbole. But I will be direct about where the heavier responsibility sits: the left has mainstreamed the idea that conservatives are Nazis, fascists and irredeemably evil in a way that has no equivalent on the mainstream right. That rhetoric has fed Antifa, BLM riots, property destruction and very likely the environment in which assassination attempts on conservative leaders get attempted and internally justified by the people who attempt them.

Words matter. Hyperbole escalates conflict. Conflict escalates further. Americans are not stupid. They can see when the language being used to describe their political opponents has stopped being argument and started being dehumanization. When they see it, they either disengage entirely or they conclude that the other side really is as dangerous as advertised. Neither outcome is good for a country that still needs to function together.

Disagreement is not hate. Criticism is not violence. Different worldviews are not threats to democracy. A country that forgets those three things is not heading toward a better version of itself. It is heading toward the versions of history we should have learned from the first time.