BRUNSWICK — Ever since the Republicans in Congress proclaimed a desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act, prominent progressive liberals have been lamenting dire ramifications should that happen. They have made wild claims that the elderly and our children will die as the result of repeal. Their fear-mongering has permeated nearly every news broadcast on every major network since before President Trump took office. The notion that children will die if the Republicans get their way is consistently implied by many liberal media commentators, pop icons and those in political leadership positions.

That steady drumbeat has a powerful impact on people. The connotation of children dying is a prepotent message that seeps into the subconscious mind and works on all of us.

This type of psychological programming sensitizes us to the connotation of death and dying, and, when framed within a message alleging who is responsible for the death, it creates a villain for people to hate and a target to fight. The progressive liberals don’t want to repeal the ACA, so they have ratcheted up their rhetoric to imply that children will die and the Republicans will be at fault. Their talking points link the words “children,” “Republicans,” “death,” “resist” and “fight,” and by doing so, they have created a sense of dire urgency and identified a villain in need of elimination.

Once violence erupts, progressive liberals explain that the perpetrators are really victims who should be treated as an oppressed, marginalized special-interest group and, therefore, are not culpable.

We have seen this process take shape on college campuses and in the protests on city streets across this country.

In January, pop culture icon Madonna proclaimed, in a profanity-laden tirade at a Women’s March rally, that she had had thoughts of “blowing up the White House.” Within that context, the rest of her speech was more than just spotted with violent and hostile connotations directed at our current president and his administration.

In February, in that former bastion of free speech, the University of California at Berkeley, the university was unable to keep violent protesters dressed in black, hooded ninja costumes from taking away a conservative speaker’s platform. With their faces covered, the anarchists were able to cause over $100,000 in property damage and suppress free speech – priceless.

Shockingly, campus police made only one arrest and Berkeley city police made no arrests! The lack of a law enforcement response to the criminal activity was a tacit agreement with the violence and served only to encourage more of it.

In early May, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced her opposition to our new president using military jargon, saying that she had joined the “resistance.”

More recently, we all saw former comedian Kathy Griffin with a gruesome depiction of herself holding a likeness of our president’s severed head. The two most salient, yet thinly veiled messages were her support for the killing of our president and her appreciation for the ruthless barbarism of radical Islamic terrorists.

It is no wonder, then, that people with a left-leaning political ideology and who are predisposed to violence are acting out. They keep hearing the same two points emphasized over and over again: “We are at war with Republicans and they are killing us.” The exaggerated rhetoric, the pervasiveness of these vitriolic messages, is pathogenic of an increasingly sick society, and dysregulated progressive liberals are fueling the fires of hostility and violence.

While progressive liberal leaders like Nancy Pelosi, pop stars and media commentators are not directly responsible for the shootings last month in Alexandria, Virginia, they do share a responsibility for creating a nationwide cultural acceptance of violence as means to an end.

That is just wrong.

Political rhetoric is unlikely to go away. Vitriolic diatribes between political parties must go away.

“We the people” must demand that our political leaders stop the hate-filled hyperbole and get back to discussing the issues concerning American citizens. Stop with the political grandstanding in order to make the next news cycle and find solutions that are in Americans’ best interests. Stop with the adult version of a temper tantrum after losing the presidential election and move on.

We have to tell the liberal-leaning media that we are not going to listen to them. We are not going to watch their networks or read their newsprint. We have to tell the pop stars we are not buying their music or watching their movies, and we have to tell them why. Change your tone or we will reject you.

My pastor once said, “What we tolerate today we will inherit tomorrow,” and I want none of the violence.