Didn’t the man child in the White House tell a group of union thugs in Philly that he would bring a gun to a knife fight?
I believe this happens because there is a real pathology that affects a mind that is attracted to liberal/socialist values. First, there is a significant break from reality, a magical thinking event that allows them to imagine money growing on trees. That is followed by a narcissism that allows them to believe they deserve their fair share of the magic money. That is followed by aggressive efforts to acquire that money, with the less intelligent using brute force to commit open but illegal theft, and the more sophisticated to use law, position, and power to arrange obscure but legal theft.
Part of the pathology, however, is a psychotic degree of rationalization. I don’t mean that in the sense of hyperbole, but in a clinical sense, the kind of rationalization a serious criminal uses to justify the most horrific actions. Al Capone, it is said, saw himself as one of the good guys.
Furthermore, this rationalization is confined to the imaginative powers of the affected person. Like a comedian once said, the people in his dreams were never any smarter than he was. Same rule applies here. The pathology of leftism is rooted in violence against and disrespect for the person and property rights of others. Therefore it is inescapable that their imagined projections of conservative minds would be tainted with their own violent imaginative resources. They think of us as violent because that is all they have in themselves to project onto us.
Whereas conservatives tend to the opposite rationalization. We respect the rule of law, the rights of person and property, and we have a deep expectation and hope we will reach that place in the liberal mind by peaceful, civilized means. We project that onto them because that is who we are, and we expect them to be like us.
Both rationalizations are misguided, and it is difficult to say which is more dangerous.