Schweizer: “Political violence will get worse” until we deal with cancerous rhetoric

The shots that rang through the ballroom at the Washington Hilton last week bounced off the same walls as when President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed 45 years ago. But the reaction to the two events says how much our culture has degraded. In 1981, the Academy Awards were postponed for 24 hours. When emcee Johnny Carson opened the broadcast by wishing Reagan well in his recovery, there was thunderous applause from the Hollywood audience. All those years later, two days before the attempt, liberal talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the First Lady having the “glow of an expectant widow,” which he later defended as a joke aimed at her age difference to the president. Some prominent Democratic influencers on Bluesky began peddling a theory that the whole incident was somehow “staged.”