Yesterday republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave, i.e.,  ‘kicked out’ of a restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, because employees said they felt uncomfortable having her in the restaurant.  One patron even shouted at her while flipping her off as she left with her friends and security.

What jumps out from this episode is not simply bad manners but a broader pattern on the Left of treating political disagreement as moral contamination.  And that’s the real point.  Once people convince themselves that their opponents are not merely wrong but evil, then exclusion begins to feel righteous.  Refusing service, driving people out of public spaces, harassing them in restaurants, and cheering it online all become, in their minds, acts of virtue rather than intolerance.

That is what makes this more than a local food fight in Little Rock.  It is another example of the “rage culture” Jonathan Turley has been warning about — a culture in which anger is no longer an emotional excess to be restrained, but a political currency to be spent.  Rage gives people license to discard restraint and frees them from the ordinary obligations of civility.  And because it feels good to those indulging in it, it’s contagious.

In this case, the restaurant’s explanation only makes the point stronger.  It tried to wrap the decision in the language of discomfort, but the action itself is unmistakable: the governor of Arkansas was told to leave because employees and guests objected to her politics and presence.  And too often on the modern Left, exclusion is justified so long as the target is ideologically approved for mistreatment.

The social media celebration that followed was revealing.  It was not reluctant.  It was gleeful, revealing that for many activists this is not defensive behavior.  They enjoy the public shaming and sending the message that certain people are unwelcome in polite society.

And this is where the Left’s current rage becomes dangerous.  It is no longer confined to argument, protest, or even boycotts.  It has moved into a politics of ostracism.  They do not merely oppose your adversaries; they deny them ordinary fellowship.  They make a meal contingent on ideological conformity.  That corrodes democracy at a very basic level, because a free society depends on the ability of citizens with deeply different views to share public life without resorting to ostracism.

The silence from leading Democrats is deafening.  If the roles were reversed — if a liberal governor or Democratic official were thrown out of a restaurant because conservative employees felt “uncomfortable” — there would be wall-to-wall denunciations and the lead story on CNN.   It would be called bigotry, harassment, and an assault on democratic norms.  But because Sanders is a Republican, it’s been excused by the Left and that double standard is unadulterated poison.

The bigger issue is that rage is being normalized and, in many quarters, politically cultivated. Some Democratic figures and commentators have spent years encouraging confrontation, public harassment, and the denial of normal courtesy to political opponents and that’s a very dangerous and reckless game.  When leaders tell supporters, implicitly or explicitly, that the other side is morally beyond the pale, they should not be surprised when mobs begin acting accordingly.

There is also a deeper irony here.  Isn’t it the Left that endlessly talks about inclusion (remember DEI?) but are the quickest to exclude?  Many who preach tolerance show very little of it when faced with dissenting beliefs.  How can they demand safe spaces for themselves while denying common spaces to others?  What they call accountability is abject cruelty with moral self-approval.

A decent society cannot function that way for long.  Restaurants, like parks, sidewalks, theaters, and churches, are part of the fabric of civic life.  They are places where people who disagree still occupy the same world.  Once politics invades every human exchange and every shared space becomes a battleground, the nation begins to fray.  We stop seeing fellow citizens and start seeing enemies.

That is why this incident matters.  It is small in one sense — one governor, one restaurant, one ugly moment.  But it reflects a much larger sickness: the belief that hatred is justified so long as it is aimed at the “right” people.   That’s not courage, tolerance or progress, it’s tribalism in a moral costume.

The answer is not to imitate the left’s behavior, but to reject it.  Conservatives should be the side that still believes in civility, pluralism, and the simple principle that you serve people, live alongside people, and yes, break bread with people, even when you disagree with them.

So, will this ‘age of rage’ burn itself out?   I’m not a sociologist, but the fact that this matter wasn’t even reported in the NY Times or Washington Post should give us the answer to that question.