America’s left-wing political violence problem cannot be met with denial

Over the span of less than one week, America witnessed yet another allegedly left-wing assassination attempt play out at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — and also discovered that some of the ugliest recent manifestations of right-wing extremism and bigotry in the United States have allegedly been partially subsidized, for years and to the tune of millions of dollars, by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center.

It’s a new and unsettling moment, in a string of far too many such moments. It feels inescapably clear that we have a political hatred epidemic in our country, which is too frequently spilling over into political violence. We would do well to tamp down the former phenomenon, and we must stamp out the latter. It is true that myopic, consuming ideological and political tribalism exists on both sides. Curing, or at least mitigating, this crisis is a shared project. It is also an accurate reflection