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If Trump’s supporters are truly “a basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” and “irredeemable,” as Hillary Clinton described them to an LGBT crowd, is not shunning and shaming the proper way to deal with them?

So a growing slice of the American left has come to believe.

Friday, gay waiters at the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, appalled that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being served, had the chef call the owner. All decided to ask Sanders’ party to leave.

When news reached the left coast, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was ecstatic, yelling to a crowd, “God is on our side!”

Maxine’s raving went on: “And so, let’s stay the course. Let’s make sure we show up wherever … 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 they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Apparently, the left had issued marching orders.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled and booed at a Mexican restaurant last week, and then hassled by a mob outside her home. White House aide Steven Miller was called out as a “fascist” while dining in D.C. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was driven from a movie theater.

Last June, the uglier side of leftist politics turned lethal. James Hodgkinson, 66-year-old volunteer in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, opened fire on GOP congressmen practicing for their annual baseball game with the Democrats.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was wounded, almost mortally. Had it not been for Scalise’s security detail, Hodgkinson might have carried out a mass atrocity.

And the cultural atmosphere is becoming toxic.

Actor Robert De Niro brings a Hollywood crowd to its feet with cries of “F—- Trump!” Peter Fonda says that 12-year-old Barron Trump should be locked up with pedophiles. Comedienne Kathy Griffin holds up a picture of the decapitated head of the president.

To suggest what may be happening to the separated children of illegal migrants, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden puts on social media a photo of the entrance to the Nazi camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

What does this tell us about America in 2018?

The left, to the point of irrationality, despises a triumphant Trumpian right and believes that to equate it with fascists is not only legitimate, but a sign that the accusers are the real moral, righteous and courageous dissenters in these terrible times.

Historians are calling the outbursts of hate unprecedented. They are not.

In 1968, mobs cursed Lyndon Johnson, who had passed all the civil rights laws, howling, “Hey, hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today!”

After Dr. King’s assassination, a hundred cities, including the capital, were looted and burned. Scores died. U.S. troops and the National Guard were called out to restore order. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat upon. Cops were gunned down by urban terrorists. Bombings and bomb attempts were everyday occurrences. Campuses were closed down. In May 1971, tens of thousands of radicals went on a rampage to shut down D.C.

A cautionary note to progressives: Extremism is how the left lost the future to Nixon and Reagan.