IF BEING ROUTINELY INSULTED TURNS PEOPLE INTO EXTREMISTS, WHY AREN'T DEMOCRATS EXTREMISTS?

Ben Shapiro is really pushing this idea hard today:





Shapiro has positioned himself as a right-wing #NeverTrumper, so we're expected to believe that what he means by this is "You say that conservatives are horrible, ignorant extremists and conservatives will rally around a horrible, ignorant extremist." But -- at the risk of repeating what I've said before here -- why isn't this true of Democrats?

Here's what your side says about us every day.





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So where's our Trump? Why haven't we dumped all the left-centrists and conciliators and reachers-across-the-aisle and begun rallying around a candidate who says all Republicans are subhuman, addle-pated, criminal-minded scum?

We've had people in our party who were somewhat Trumpish -- Alan Grayson, Cynthia McKinney -- but they've been pushed to the margins (although Grayson keeps trying to make his way back to the mainstream). Hell, we could have embraced Roseanne Barr herself back when she positioned herself as a lefty.

But we didn't. We take a lot of abuse from the right. Somehow, we manage not to rush into the arms of conspiracy-minded demagogic bigots.