By Victor Davis Hanson
The proper conservative response to last Wednesday’s violent entry into the Capitol and vandalism, as well as assaults on law-enforcement, is to identify the guilty parties and ensure they are arrested.
Such deterrence will prevent any future devolution from legal popular protests into thuggery. No constitutional republic can tolerate its iconic heart stormed, breached, and defiled.
Is Some Violence Worse than Others?
Of course, there is no such thing as “good” or “acceptable” violence of either Trump supporters or of the Antifa and BLM sort.
Yet the latter were largely exempt from any consequences for most of the summer—despite Joe Biden’s demagogic implication that the now multibillion-dollar funded BLM was treated harshly in comparison to the rogue Trump rioters.
Do we remember the authorities’ exemptions given to “warlord” Raz Simone and his armed thugs who, with absolute impunity, took over a Seattle “autonomous zone” known as CHOP or CHAZ, where four shootings and two deaths followed? Who exactly destroyed or vandalized thousands of state and federal public monuments—some in Washington, D.C.—and burned and looted hundreds of buildings with impunity?
Those who wrongly demanded to defund the police, now rightly deplore the lack of a Capitol police presence. Their only consistency is their own perceived political self-interest.
Biden himself rarely if ever, without exceptions, outright condemned the atrocious violence of Antifa and indeed contextualized it as an “idea”—a disincarnate entity that apparently could magically also burn and loot.
Again, his inaugural call for unity was quickly superseded by his surreal accusations that the police were racist in not quelling the violence. Yet the problem at the Capitol was not that security was racially selective, but that there was not much security at all. And the lapse was probably not by design as much as sheer incompetence.
The president-elect’s demeanor and furor certainly were not compatible with his media image as the supposedly angelic uniter of the country. Within 24 hours he had gone from blasting the police authorities as racists to the old reductio ad Hitlerum trope of comparing a few Republican senators to Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels, in a hysterical rant that descended into incoherent numerology about the bombing of Dresden. I’m sure Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khamenei were impressed by his historical recollections.
Would that summer candidate Biden had just once said a word on behalf of the victims of Antifa and BLM—more than 700 injured law enforcement officers, billions of dollars in damage, and dozens killed over a summer of hateful violence that also wrecked the lives of thousands of struggling small business owners and their employees. What Kamala Harris said about the violent summer protests was appalling, and she was most worried about bailing out those arrested for street violence. Somehow a summer of hate and destruction earned BLM $10 billion in corporate gifts. Did anyone suggest that CEOs were subsidizing violence by crassly buying protection?
One might add that the D.C. police shooting of an unarmed white female Air Force veteran fortunately did not precipitate the sort of unhinged looting and arson seen a few months ago. And so far, police authorities, to their credit, have had no hesitation in immediately releasing the names and photos of the suspect Capitol intruders. But then again, that was a deterrent modus operandi that also might have curbed Antifa and BLM violence earlier, had it been as well implemented widely against such miscreants.
In the 24 hours after the initial outrage of the unchecked violence in the Capitol, a weird cancel mob formed quickly. Democrats were demanding senators resign who voted against the legitimacy of the electors.
Lawyers who defended Trump were hounded and their firms leveraged to fire them. Book deals of suspect senators were canceled. Resignations were the order of the day.
One would have never remembered that leftist protestors were once with impunity beating on the doors of the Supreme Court to get in during and after the Kavanaugh hearings, as others stormed into the halls of Congress and bullied senators. Still others this June lit up a church in their “mostly peaceful” efforts to enter the White House grounds. Very few Democratic senators then called for calm and to take a step back.
Multimillionaire Michelle Obama, who seems seldom to allow a serious crisis to go to waste, was calling for the complete weaponization of social media and the permanent banning of Trump. A scared Mark Zuckerberg seemed to agree. The multibillionaire had infused $350 million of his own money into key preselected precincts to boost voting turnout in a way the Left in the old days would have called the dark money that undermines democracy.
The Chinese Model
A day after Michelle Obama’s call, Trump coincidentally was indeed banned from Twitter “for life,” along with a number of conservatives, and “indefinitely” canceled from Facebook. Trump followers fleeing to alternate social media sites discovered that their apps could be blocked by Apple and Google.
Amazon joined in blocking the servers of one of these, again coincidentally. The Left and a few terrified Republicans planned to impeach Trump even if out of office, sort of like those grotesque stories of those who hang, decapitate, or chop up the corpses of the dead.
The trillion-dollar social media monopolies, on cue from the Obamas and the Left, are now making the necessary adjustments for a hard left-wing controlled presidency and Congress.
Soon, in calmer times, antitrust lawyers will be suing Big Tech for its efforts to destroy its business rivals and ideological opponents as a textbook case of corporate market rigging.
In the 19th century, “progressives” sought to curb the power of monopolies and trusts on the logic that the proverbial people had only the railroads or telegraphs to travel or communicate, and should be freed from their octopus “tentacles.” The railroad argument, “Ride a horse if you don’t like us,” never washed.
Now progressives enlist social media monopolies to ensure that they alone can control, censor, and cancel incorrect communications over the publicly owned airspace. “Just email or use your cell phone, if you don’t like us” won’t wash either. Progressives are no longer the watchdogs breaking up trusts. They are the trusts breaking up watchdogs.
Soon we may see all alternative social media emasculated, those with conservative views deplatformed, and the United States becoming essentially a closed society. How can we resist China when we become China—the model of efficiency in the mind of many progressives, some of whom praise their control of the social media and their solar and wind energy authoritarianism.
2021 Worse than 2020?
As a day-late, dollar-short, now contrite Trump was belatedly calling for calm, and finally a peaceful transition and unity, the Wall Street Journal also belatedly wanted Trump to resign now and leave a few days early. Would he do a public perp walk out of the Oval Office, so that in “Game-of-Thrones” fashion the mob could throw trash and feces at him?
Some of Trump’s cabinet members apparently virtue gabbed to the media that they had considered removal of Trump by the 25th Amendment. Time will tell whether that was a wise career move or performance art, given incoming Joe Biden does not seem always alert.
Even a few White House appointees resigned early to illustrate to the nation their utter shock at the uncouthness of the president that they had gladly served for months or years. How odd that so many appointees willingly joined the Trump team who would never have been appointed again to much of anything before 2017, then enjoyed their tenure, and then when fired or resigned over their policy recommendations, suddenly lectured the nation, in their newfound moral superiority, for voting for a supposedly now evil Donald Trump.
There will be about another week of this ritually hating Trump through impeachment or removal, and then he will leave office quietly.
The Impending Revolution
Attention will turn to President Biden, and whether there will be an end to the Senate filibuster, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and a 50-state union—and an entire remake of the United States as we knew it.
The Left will need this new monopoly on information as dissent grows. No wonder then, in a few hours of national panic, it took care of the family business, as Michael Corleone once put it. After all, who could be bothered by a plague, stalled state vaccinations, a recession, and a country torn apart by an election that saw 100 million votes cast before election day?
I disagree.
Stopping a coup is not a protest. It’s a response.
They punched first. You don’t get to “roll cameras” and play the victim when you poke the bear and it finally fights back.
All of that would be a hostile takeover by despotic and illegal forces, so arresting them, fighting them, and opposing them is vitally necessary.
It’s a civil war.
@Nathan Blue: AGREED!
dIf not now, when?
Liberal have been trying to kill conservatives for 60 years. Last year they did kill 2 conservatives, for sure, maybe more. Portland and Denver.
It looks like liberals killedAshli. Not proved; but looks.
Racism is NEVER where Democrats point. NEVER. And the lack of security could be due to the fact that Trump’s supporters are NEVER violent. Only when led by BLM, it seems, do they turn violent.
Actually, if those committing violence had been arrested, tried and put in jail instead of catch and release, they would not have been available to incite the riot at the Capital.
Why would China, firmly in control of the Democrat party that is firmly in control of our government allow that?
In fact, in typical Democrat efficiency, in New York when the pre-determined classes of people allowed to receive the vaccine don’t show up, the vaccines made ready for them has to be thrown away. But, don’t forget…. Orange Man Bad.