Far-left Florida Democrat Angie Nixon claims GOP is ‘literally trying to kill’ black Americans

Angie Nixon says the GOP is "literally trying to kill" black Americans. Not figuratively, not through some policy she disagrees with and thinks will have bad downstream effects. Literally. That's the word she chose, and it's worth sitting with for a second before we move on to the usual back-and-forth, because it tells you something about where the incentives in Democratic primaries have landed.

There's a version of this argument that's just heated rhetoric about health outcomes or funding cuts, the kind of thing you could push back on with data and move along. This isn't that. This is a sitting state lawmaker telling voters that compromise itself is the enemy, that the other party isn't wrong on policy but is running something closer to a plot. Once you've told your constituents that, what exactly does bipartisan cooperation look like the next day? You've defined half the legislature as adversaries in a murder plot. There's no bill to co-sponsor after that.

We'd take this more seriously as political theater if it weren't so obviously a strategy. Say the most alarming possible thing, get the clip, get the fundraising email, let the outrage cycle do the rest. It works, that's the annoying part. But it also cheapens the word "kill" for the next time someone wants to use it about something that actually deserves that word.

If your working theory of the opposition party is that they want you dead, you've made governing impossible and you've made your own voters angrier and more scared for no good reason. That's not fighting for anybody. That's just noise dressed up as courage.