When a child isn’t punished for throwing a tantrum and instead gets his way, he repeats the behavior in the future. So it will be with the Left, too, should Donald Trump win the presidency this year. Having gotten away with roiling the country in 2020 and driving him from office (by hook and crook), writes commentator Rich Lowry, they would make 2025 the wildest year politically in American history.
In fact, the Left would launch an “insurrection” (the word has been redefined, remember) that might make 2020 look tame.
Emphasizing this reality, Lowry observes with wry understatement that Trump’s “adversaries don’t have a history of accepting his victories with equanimity.”
“Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 launched conspiracy theories about how Russia had helped him win; catalyzed a years-long law enforcement investigation into him and his campaign based on those theories; and set off protests in the streets,” the writer continues.
“All that was mild, given what may yet be in the offing.”
Lowry then notes that Trump’s opponents claim to be alarmed by his post-2020 actions and his labeling of his current campaign a “revenge tour,” and a few may even be sincere.
“For most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the next president,” Lowry then warns.
“No, it means blocking Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or faith in our system of government.”
“In this view, democracy has only one legitimate outcome, and it doesn’t involve Donald Trump back at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” the commentator adds.
Lowry mentions that only a minority of Democrats have even distanced themselves from the Colorado and Maine decisions to remove Trump from the ballot; this and other banana republic-like measures already pursued are unprecedented in America.
“It’s hard to imagine what’s more extreme than one side in our politics indicting its leading opponent, creating the real prospect of jailing him in the months before an election and excluding him from the ballot in select states,” Lowry explains.
Yet the Left’s melodramatic warnings make imagining “what’s more extreme” possible. For example, Lowry highlights the notion, put forth by The Washington Post and others, that Trump will deliver dictatorship.
“If he returns to power, ‘the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom,’” WaPo wrote.
This is projection, of course. While dictators centralize power, Trump’s 2017-2021 deregulation represented a loosening of the federal leash. It is the Left that ever arrogates power and grows the Washington leviathan.
Yet “Beware Trump!” is also a dark view predicated on the idea that America’s institutions — such as the judiciary, military, federal bureaucracy, and states themselves — would simply roll over for a man the establishment intensely despises, Lowry argues. Note that Trump encountered so much Deep State opposition during his presidency that his agenda was partially thwarted. This was epitomized by a 2018 New York Times essay titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” in which the anonymous writer boasted, euphemistically, of being part of the “steady state.”
The bottom line, however, is this: If you suppose your opponent is akin to a Nazi and would visit fascism upon you — that his victory means tyranny — what is justified to prevent this?
Answer: any means necessary.
Of course, not all leftists believe the propaganda; they’re more monolithic in behavior than motive. Some are “Kronstadt sailors” devoted to the “revolution”; many, overcome with prejudice and hatred, run on pure emotion; others make money facilitating leftism; and the megalomaniacal Machiavellians want power (and a given individual can have more than one motivation). What it all adds up to, however, is something a thousand times closer to an insurrection than J6 could ever be: 2020 on steroids.
As such, it’s instructive to review what actually happened that fateful year. To wit:
- There were 600-plus violent Antifa/BLM riots, including a May attack on the White House in which Secret Service agents were wounded and Trump was rushed into a protective bunker. Note that these riots resulted in arson, looting, billions in property damage, and dozens of lost lives. Also note that Democrats encouraged this violence wink-and-nod style, with Kamala Harris saying the “protests” “should not” stop.
- The intelligence agencies worked to undermine Trump; for example, Big Intel spread the disinfo that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinfo. Given a poll showing that 16 percent of Biden voters would’ve reconsidered their support had they known about the laptop, this alone could have swung the election. (By the way, is this surprising? Senator Chuck Schumer said in 2017, in response to Trump’s intel community criticism, that “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Makes you wonder who’s really running the country, huh?)
- Liberal psychologist Robert Epstein, who has studied Big Tech election meddling, found that the tech companies are able to swing 15 million votes toward their chosen candidate. Note that they were united against Trump — and directly censored the Biden laptop story.
- The mainstream media, academia, and entertainment were also aligned against Trump.
- Democratic governors locked down their economies using Covid as a pretext, happily, critics say, to damage Trump.
- Democrat-run states normalized vote-fraud-facilitating mail-in balloting to stack the deck against Trump.
Now, when you have a major political party, intel agencies, Big Tech, media, academia, entertainment, numerous state governments — and countless violent foot soldiers in the streets — all working hand-in-glove to destabilize the country and seize power, what do you call it?
If J6 was an “insurrection,” this was a revolution. And won’t a tantrum that succeeded be repeated?
