Political Violence

I have viewed recent actions by the Trump administration to curtail freedom of speech with alarm. Their move to silence Jimmy Kimmel was misguided at best. Kimmel's comments were inaccurate, insensitive and divisive, not illegal. Similarly. Attorney General Bondi's threat to target individuals engaged in "hate speech" is a step down a slippery slope. The really bad news is that these actions simply continued similar approaches taken by the Biden administration. Biden not only tried to silence thousands of people on social media platforms but went as far as creating a Disinformation Governing Board to decide what could be said and what could not. Fortunately, that move toward authoritarianism was short-lived. As damming as all of these actions are, however, the upward trend in political violence we are seeing is as scary as it gets. A poll taken by YouGov ( https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll) shortly after the Kirk assassination found 11% of those surveyed said that political violence can sometimes be justified. If 1 or 2% had said that. you could write it off to radical thinking. The fact that acceptance of political violence may be slipping into mainstream thinking could be catastrophic unless we find ways to reverse this ominous trend.