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As Donald Trump’s second inauguration approaches, an acrimonious controversy is splitting his defeated but still quite insane leftist opposition: should they behave civilly toward Trump and his supporters or continue to pretend that the incoming president and those who voted for him are fascists and insurrectionists who pose an imminent threat to what they unctuously and counterfactually insist upon calling “our democracy”?

The two sides are squaring off against each other now. Disgraced former CNN talking head Don Lemon has lined up loudly and unequivocally with the latter camp and is taking aim at MSNBC’s farther-than-far-left Joe Scarborough for daring to suggest that maybe everyone should just calm down and stop acting as if a Trump presidency meant the end of the world as we know it.

Fox News reported Monday that it all started with an exchange Scarborough had with former RNC chair Michael Steele, a diehard and squishy McCainite/Romneyite stooge of the left, “after the host praised former President Barack Obama for being friendly with President-elect Trump at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral.” Steele shot back: “You like to say 78 million people voted for Donald Trump, well 82 million people voted for Joe Biden… civility is a two-way street.” Yeah, that’s right: Steele added a million extra phantoms to the ones who already voted for Old Joe.

Anyway, as to civility, sure, Mike, it is a two-way street. And so let’s remember what Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Absolut) saidback in 2018, during Trump’s first administration: “I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. And maybe there will be.” That was not long before Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Get Trump) said this about Trump’s Cabinet members: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.”

Then in June 2020, during the George Floyd riots, Kamala Harris, who had a great future ahead of her, said of the protests: “They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that on both levels. They’re not going to let up and they should not and we should not.”

Can Steele produce quotes from three patriotic politicians appearing to call for violence against leftists? Of course, he cannot. Civility is indeed a two-way street, but the left is almost wholly responsible for its being so sorely lacking in American politics today.

Don Lemon, however, would strenuously disagree with that assessment. On his “Live at Five” podcast, Lemon unleashed a furious rant against Joe Scarborough for calling for civility toward Trump supporters: “If someone disrespects my loved one, I don’t have to smile in their f**king face! And they’re going to know it…. These are the very same MAGA people who have called, and Donald Trump has helped promote, calling Michelle Obama a man. I’m not smiling in your face if you’re calling my sister and my mother or my wife or my girlfriend, a man. F**k you!”

Now, wait a minute, Don. Why would any leftist find such claims about Michelle Obama to be offensive? Whether she herself is really a man or a woman, aren’t we supposed to believe that a man who claims to be a woman should be heaped with praise and congratulations? So why would it be a terrible insult to suggest that a particular woman might be one of them?

Without pausing to explain that anomaly, Lemon added: “If they’re going to acquiesce seemingly like that publicly, then what does that mean in the broader sense of the structure of the fabric of our society?” He told Scarborough: “You have to indicate to the American people that this is not normal… grinning with someone that you have called a fascist over the last couple of years and the last months. That’s not normal. Folks are tired of the behavior being normalized.”

Lemon is right. The Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. If their claims about Trump over the last eight years were correct, they have no business acting as if he is a normal American president-elect about to go through a normal inauguration. If Democrats act as if it’s all business as usual, they’re tacitly admitting that they’ve been lying for all these years: the sky isn’t falling, Trump isn’t an insurrectionist or a fascist, and he is no threat to “our democracy.” But the only alternative is the uprising Nancy Pelosi wanted. That seems to be what Don Lemon wants as well.