BOSTON, UNITED STATES – Last March I wrote an article about Trump Derangement Syndrome: ‘the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the candidacy – nay, the very existence – of Donald J. Trump.’ I thought it was satire. It was meant as a bit of a laugh, at the expense of those liberals who thought Trump would ship all Mexicans and Muslims off to concentration camps. But one of the tropes of 2017 is that satire inevitably becomes reality in the most horrifying way possible.

James Hodgkinson, the man who opened fire on Republican pollies and law enforcement last week, had no known history of mental illness. His police record was that of your average white trash sleaze. In fact, on March 24, police were called to his home when a neighbour reported hearing gunshots. The sheriff who responded said he was ‘very cordial’ and ‘there was no indication that he was mentally ill or going to harm anybody.’ He wasn’t some raging whackjob or serial crook.

His politics, too, were those of an ordinary left-wing Democrat. A volunteer on the Sanders campaign, he signed a petition calling for the President’s impeachment two months after the inauguration. And his Facebook was, quite naturally, just one long anti-Trump screed. ‘Trump is a selfish, inhuman, with Delusions of Grandeur.’ ‘This Country is full of Hateful Racists.’ ‘Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump and Co.’ [all sic]

No: Hodgkinson doesn’t hail from the Maoist fringe. He was simply obeying Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running-mate, who urged Democrats to ‘fight in the streets’ in a campaign video. Then there’s Madonna, who admitted at a post-inaugural protest that she ‘thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’. Just last month, the comedienne Kathy Griffin annexed the news cycle by posing in an Isis-style photo with the President’s severed, mutilated head. And this comes less than a week after New York’s Delacorte Theatre debuted its production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which casts a Trump look-alike in the titular role… climaxing, of course, with his ritual assassination by members of the Senate.

This isn’t ‘art’ or ‘an exercise in free speech’ – it’s lefty murder porn. And Hodgkinson isn’t the only perv who gets off on it. Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and Larry King all came out to support Griffin’s photo shoot. ‘If you step out into that spotlight and you’re doing the crazy things that [Trump] is doing, we’re the last line of defence,’ Carry said. (Well, at least until James T. Hodgkinson came along.) And while most of Delacorte Theatre’s sponsors have withdrawn their funding, the staunchly anti-Trump New York Times has refused to do so. One of their editorial writers called the furore over the production ‘exaggerated outrage’ and ‘fake news’.

‘I expect the queues for “Julius Caesar”… will grow even longer after this bogus scandal,’ the NYT concluded. And what now that a Democratic activist has shot two police officers, a GOP congressman, a lobbyist, and a staffer? Will liberals be satisfied? Have their gruesome fantasies at last been fulfilled? Or if the whole country’s tasted innocent blood, will those lines keep growing?

All signs point to the latter. As Huffington Post contributor Greg Saunders tweeted following the shooting: ‘Maybe if it’s Republican politicians being targeted now, today’s awful tragedy might have a silver lining.’ Saunders was well and truly outdone, though, by Washington Post writer Malcolm Harris. ‘Hearing… Steve Scalise is stable,’ he wrote, ‘but a lot of Americans die from hospital errors so keep crossing your fingers’. And, a few minutes later: ‘If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking pot-shots at the GOP house leadership considered self-defence?’

Sanders, of course, disavowed Hodgkinson’s support. When it came to light that the shooter was a major Bernie Bro, the geriatric pinko took the Senate floor to ‘condemn this action in the strongest possible terms’. Yet, just three days before the attack, he gave a speech calling Trump a ‘reactionary demagogue’ and ‘the worst and most dangerous president in the history of this country’. Even more disturbing, he warned his supporters against the ‘extreme right-wing leadership in the US House and the US Senate’. Turns out that, when an avowed socialist politician calls on avowed socialist followers to stage a revolution, some of them take up arms. Quelle bloody surprise.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is now reaching its peak, and everyone who’s wilfully exaggerated the ‘threat’ posed by this presidency (i.e. 95 per cent of liberals) are partially to blame. There’s no sense in being delicate about it: Hodgkinson was a partisan terrorist, and anti-Trump extremists are responsible for the mass hysteria out of which he emerged. If Leftists had any sense of decency, any respect for human life, they’d publicly recant their absurd caricatures of Republicans as Nazis and fascists. That, too, is a kind of terrorism: if you convince half the country that the President’s going to send jackboot thugs into the streets to exterminate minorities, imprison dissenters, and hand the government over to Russia, this sort of travesty is inevitable. It’s perverse, and it has to stop.

Don’t hold your breath, though. Expect more of the same nonsense about how conservatives are provoking jihadists, cop-killers, and anarchist rioters with their xenophobic, racist, classist agenda. Hey! As Mr Harris said, even violence committed against us is our own fault. It’s just ‘self-defence’. Talk about victim-blaming.

#RepublicanLivesMatter, anyone? … Anyone?

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