Bring on the insanity: Rubio staff member attacked, hospitalized

Not that long ago I wrote about how politics has gotten a lot more toxic in the past 20 years and I think largely that the media, and especially social-media, is what is driving it. Back when I was in high school and college, there were people that would disagree on politics or just overall ideology, but things would only get so heated when it was a discussion between peers and friends. These days people can become tribal in an instant and they are only a few clicks away from finding a group of people that will create an echo-chamber where everyone just gets more and more worked up until someone feels as though they have to blow something up or attack anyone that is promoting the ideals of the "enemy side."

I recall being in college and people would willingly wear the shirt or hat of a preferred candidate, or just put a bumper sticker on their car to show who they supported. Yard signs were common even though now that I think about it, it all seems a bit silly. I had a couple of political bumper stickers on my car at certain times and now when I look back on it I feel like there wasn't much point to that.

If someone disagreed with you about said candidate they probably wouldn't say anything to you, let alone berate you, cause property damage, or in this case attack you for working for the guy whose party you do not agree with.

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The staff member is pictured above on his way to the hospital and the details are sketchy but while wearing a Rubio hat and a DeSantis shirt, he was attacked by 4 people in Florida who told him "no Republicans are allowed in their neighborhood." He suffered a broken jaw and internal bleeding and will need reconstructive surgery to repair his face.

All this just because he feels differently than you do about something. That is pure crazy right there.

The media and police are not releasing much in the way of information about the attackers and I have my own reservations about why that might be and I'll just keep it to myself but in the meantime I want you to imagine how all over the news this would be if it was someone that was working for a Democrat that this happened to. I know already how that would go. The perpretrators would be "white supremacist, fascist Nazis" or something along those lines and the Democrats around the country would be claiming that this is MoAr PruUf RePuBlIcAnS aRe ThE pArTy Of HaTe!

This needs to be reigned in, don't you think? If everyone starts behaving like this every time we have an election it is just going to be a non-stop bloodbath.

I am not a Republican, I am a conservative though and I sometimes wonder if I am looking at things through a tainted spectrum myself but honestly, I don't recall things like this coming at the hands of conservatives, but it appears as though leftists are doing this sort of intimidation on a regular basis and it all started to get really out of control right around the time that Trump was elected.

It wasn't always this way. In college I worked for a Democrat friend of mine who was trying to get elected to a state position. In that time I had to approach people who were definitely not on his side. Words were exchanged, but that is where it ended. There was some shouting but then it was put to a stop. At no point did it look like people were going to come to blows. The sort of result that just happened to Rubio's staffer could very well escalate until both sides are doing it all the time. It makes me even more upset that the cowards who did this to the staffer outnumbered him 4-1.

Politics suck now and they have become so bad that we are beating up strangers simply for supporting the other side. Eventually someone is going to end up getting shot and when that happens we'll just circle back to the gun-control debate... just like clockwork. There are probably some people in power that would like exactly that sort of thing to happen.