Open season on Republicans of all rank: Breakdown of America’s social compact?

As a New York theater production of the graphic assassination of the president gets standing ovations, a gunman who allegedly wanted to “kill as many Republicans as possible” opened fire on a field in which GOP members of Congress were practicing for a charity baseball game.

Rep. Steve Scalise, a congressional staffer and members of the congressional police force were shot on June 14 in Alexandria, Virginia as the Republicans were at a practice for the annual baseball game against Democrats.

Scalise, the third ranking member of House Republican leadership, was reported in stable condition after the attack by a man identified as James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois.

The increasingly toxic quality of partisan and cultural discourse in American has given rise to concerns about the breakdown of civil order based in part on the writings of English philosopher John Locke concerning the recognition of unalienable rights including the Social Compact.

Writing about a new, controversial New York Shakespeare production, Boston radio host and WorldTribune.com columnist Jeff Kuhner wrote that: “The question must be asked: Do many liberals secretly wish that President Trump be assassinated? Sadly, the answer is: yes.”

Hodgkinson was killed after firing up to 100 rounds from an assault rifle. He was shot by two U.S. Capitol Police officers who were accompanying Scalise to Eugene Simpson Stadium Park for the scheduled baseball practice ahead of the June 15 charity game.

The officers were both wounded as they used their pistols to shoot at Hodgkinson.

“Congressman Scalise is a friend, and a very good friend,” President Donald Trump said in a national statement from the White House. “He’s a patriot. And he’s a fighter. He will recover from this assault – and Steve, I want you to know that you have the prayers not only of the entire city behind you, but of an entire nation, and frankly the entire world. America is praying for you and America is praying for all of the victims of this terrible shooting.”

Zachary Barth, a congressional staffer for Texas Rep. Roger Williams, was shot in the leg but is expected to recover. The two Capitol Police officers who were injured are also expected to make a full recovery.

Matt Mika, a lobbyist for Tyson Foods who sometimes practices with the team, was also identified as one of the victims, and Sen. Jeff Flake said Mika was the most seriously injured.

Shortly after the shooting, Rep. Mark Walker, North Carolina Republican, told NBC News that it appeared the “gunman was there to kill as many Republican members as possible.”

Rep. Ron DeSantis, Florida Republican, recounted an “odd” encounter he had as he was leaving the field just minutes before the shooting: “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there, and it was just a little odd,” DeSantis told Fox News.

Sen. Bernie Sanders said he was “sickened” by the shooting. Reports said the Hodgkinson was reportedly “more on the progressive side of things” and had campaigned for Sanders in Iowa.

“Let me be as clear as I can be,” Sanders said. “Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.”

The Smoking Gun reported that, according to Hodgkinson’s Facebook page, he is a member of numerous left-leaning online groups, including The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans; Rachel Maddow For President 2020; Sanders For President 2020; Terminate The Republican Party; and Donald Trump is not my President.

On March 22, Hodgkinson posted to a Change.org petition that “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

Columnist Jeff Kuhner wrote that: “In New York City, liberals in the theater have added a perverse twist to their long-running series, ‘Shakespeare in the Park.’ In an adaptation of Julius Caesar, the role of Caesar is played by an actor who strongly resembles Trump – the distinctive blonde hairstyle, the long red tie and power business suit. Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, is played by someone who is supposed to be Melania Trump, which includes a thick Slavic accent. In the pivotal scene of Caesar’s murder, the Trump character is repeatedly stabbed to death by minorities (most of whom are black) and women.”

Kuhner continued: “The implicit message is clear: Trump, like Caesar, is a tyrant who poses a mortal threat to our republic and must be killed. In other words, a major theater company is producing a play in Central Park that depicts the president being gruesomely murdered on stage. At best, the ‘assassination play’ is in very poor taste. This is why Delta Airlines and Bank of America have withdrawn their sponsorships.

“Yet, liberals are not only defending it. They are celebrating it. The New York Times insists it will continue to sponsor the play, arguing it is about the right to ‘freedom of speech.’ CNN host Fareed Zakaria – an admitted serial plagiarist – calls it a ‘masterpiece’ for the ‘Trump era.’ His employer, Time-Warner, is also a sponsor.”

The irony, Kuhner added, “is that the New York Times and CNN sang a very different tune during the Obama years. They led the media charge demanding that a rodeo clown be fired simply for wearing an Obama mask. For liberal elites, to mock Obama was grounds for social ostracism; to call for the murder of Trump is a sign of heroic ‘resistance.’

The Founding Fathers “drew heavily” upon English philosopher John Locke in establishing America’s First Principles, most notably the recognition of unalienable rights, the Social Compact, and limited government, according to AmericasSurvivalGuide.com.

In his First and Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), Locke explained that in a state of nature men and women were free to pursue and defend there own interests, which resulted in a brutal state of war. To escape this warfare, individuals established government to secure the peace. Locke noted that there could be “no freedom” without a Social Compact of laws, because “liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law.”

The kind of fear-mongering and street talk that Democrat/Progressives have engaged in from before the November 8 election has brought us here--all for the reason of protecting and continuing their "progressive"/regressive "transforming" America from its roots in Constitutional limitations on power to one in which "the People" are dumbed down and propagandized so that they will, like sheep, follow false "shepherds."

Many of the "sheeple" say they are "afraid." That is what they are hearing from their captors, the Progressives, who fear they may lose grip on their control of everything from education to local government.

Let's remember, as ancient texts enlighten us, that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Man-induced fears induce nothing but ignorance and more fear.

Listen to the words of the author of The Conservative mind, Russell Kirk:

"Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. . . . And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. “They will never love where they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear. Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lord’s favor. But no such age is ours. Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado, I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistol’s. He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man; for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear, and thus are post-Christian without confessing it. Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era. . . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. “Oh no, “ they murmured, “not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?” For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . . The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . . Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . . What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the casuses of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch of the tranquillizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." Posted: March 20, 2007 in From Russell Kirk.

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