The Hypocrisy of the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ Contingent

The signs are less common now where I live, but once they were everywhere. “Hate has no home here,” in large letters, usually against the same blue background common to the Democrats’ election signs. Scattered around the main lettering, the same phrase repeated in multiple languages, although never in the language of those Americans whose ancestry was European. Moreover, one couldn’t help noticing that, during an election season, the signs would be joined by “Vote for…” followed by the name of whichever Democrats were in the race.

Here in Virginia, the juxtaposition became painfully ironic during the last gubernatorial election when Abigail Spanberger was joined on the ticket by attorney general candidate Jay Jones, notoriously the unapologetic author of e-mails wishing for the death of a former political rival and the suffering of his wife and children. Unsurprising, of course, and for the simplest of reasons. For Democrats, “hate” never applies to their own actions. No matter how aggressively they spew their vitriol, it’s somehow justified by their purity of heart. When you’re always on the side of the angels, it’s entirely justifiable to make devils of your opponents. (RELATED: Yes, Virginia, Jay Jones Is Evil)

And so here we are in the aftermath of the latest attempt on the life of Donald Trump, and this time, perhaps the majority of his cabinet members. One can be deliberately obtuse in the manner of Barack Obama, insisting that we don’t know the shooter’s motives yet. One can suddenly proclaim a commitment to taking the “high road,” following Hakeem Jeffries. One might try to bootleg some predictable Trump calumnies into the discussion, as Norah O’Donnell attempted on 60 Minutes, even while pretending to be sympathetic to the horror just unfolded at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (RELATED: Why Assassins Almost Always Go After Republicans)

I will leave it to others to catalogue all the hatred strewn about over the last 48 hours on BlueSky and other organs of the left. My capacity for vomit-inducing self-righteous and self-deluding hatred reached the hurling point within the first few hours after the event. Instead, I simply wish to draw attention to the left’s overweening hatred for Donald Trump, its vicious contempt for the strawman they’ve made of “MAGA,” their luxuriant indulgence in the putrid stew of antisemitism, and their desire to see America humiliated by Iran. (RELATED: TDS Now Resembles Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’)

Even at the height of the Vietnam War and the civil rights era, a time I lived through as a teenager and young adult, American self-hatred had a self-conscious awkwardness. Except for the most radical of the SDS or, one might add, the SPLC types (it was always a grift), there remained, if nothing else, a misguided idealism about much of the critique being offered by the Bobby Kennedys or the George McGoverns. Even as a college student, I found McGovern’s politics a very hard sell, but the fact that he’d flown 35 bombing missions over Axis-controlled Europe, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross in the process, demanded a certain respect.

My professors, even at a notably liberal college, were almost uniformly liberal, and, viewed through the lens of subsequent decades, helped set the stage for the ruinous leftward drift of higher education — but they weren’t crypto-communists, simply men whose undoubted intellect was regrettably blind to the long-term consequences of their liberal bias. I recall a conversation during my last semester in which I confessed to an admired — and very liberal — political science professor that I’d come to see myself as a “Burkean conservative.” I think he saw this as a youthful aberration on my part, something that I would undoubtedly grow out of over time. But he didn’t dismiss it or treat it as a sign of incipient political depravity. (RELATED: The Collegiate Anti-Woke Counterrevolution)

But that’s all gone now if one pays even the slightest attention to what the Democrats now tell each other on a daily basis. Over the last six weeks, I devoted considerable energy to opposing Spanberger’s fundamentally dishonest redistricting proposal here in Virginia. This meant listening to and reading about what the Democrats chose to say in promoting this measure, and that was noxiously instructive. If one delved even superficially into the world of its online supporters, one quickly discovered that their animus had almost nothing to do with the state of Virginia and everything to do with a passionate and visceral hatred for Donald Trump. (RELATED: Californicating Virginia: Democrats’ Misleading Appeal to ‘Fairness’)

So, having suffered for nearly two months reading these daily outpourings of anger, I find it utterly unsurprising that, once again, someone marinated in this witches’ brew chose to try to murder Donald Trump. More to the point, these people have taken their hatred and turned it into a virtue, something to be flaunted, something to share proudly, something — let’s face it — akin to the shining, cheering faces of the crowds who once attended the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany.

This is what horrifies me, not just that there are haters in our political world, not even that some are motivated to attempt an assassination. Instead, the true horror lies in the fact that many millions of Americans have now made hatred, hatred of Donald Trump and of what he represents, the single organizing principle of their daily existence, evident in their every online post, celebrated whenever they gather with friends. When one realizes that there were Americans who wanted the rescue of our downed airmen to fail, simply to deprive Trump of a success, one stares into a chasm of darkness. Instead of legitimate political differences, we now must contend with mindless hatred.

The neighborhood signs, then, may have disappeared, fallen out of fashion, no longer sufficient to the craving for public virtue signaling. But in their place, hatred — genuine, vicious, unmitigated hatred —has taken up a long-term lease in the hearts of too many on the left. If we are ever going to reclaim the good at the heart of our nation, then the time has come to start an eviction process, challenging this hatred whenever, wherever it appears.

And hope that we’re not too late.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

The Long Road Ahead for Virginia

Gerrymandering and the Tyranny of Big Cities

The Iran Rescue: The Payoff of Painful Lessons

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025.  You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and its predecessor, Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.