The left’s continued self-destruction
Recently I published “Why the Left Has No Credibility.” Sadly, things have gotten worse just in the short time since that appeared. There’s truth to the adage that just when you think things can’t get worse, they do.
Presumably all have heard about the riot at University of California at Berkeley, in response to a planned appearance by Breitbart.com writer Milo Yiannopoulos. A peaceful demonstration, which by itself fell within what the First Amendment protects and wouldn’t have led to the cancellation of the speech, turned violent when around 150 people showed up wearing masks. They started breaking windows, setting fires, and physically attacking anyone within reach. Naturally the University had to cancel the event out of legitimate public safety concerns.
The First Amendment, it should go without saying, doesn’t protect violence!
These people, who were very well organized, were clearly not students. Robert Reich, formerly Bill Clinton’s labor secretary and now a professor out there, suggested (without producing any substantive evidence) that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart.com orchestrated the riots themselves, to lend support to an idea Donald Trump tweeted the next day, that federal funds should be pulled from universities where conservative speakers get shut down by violent protests.
Reich was alleging that the “alt-right” had perpetuated a false flag, in other words.
This is what passes for serious punditry by Established (i.e., paid) columnists these days.
I could have spent 50 years and not come up with a whopper like that! Small wonder these folks have lost control of the national narrative and have to draw on silly memes like “alternative facts.”
Later, we learned of the usual George Soros connection. This group was the recipient of a $50,000 grant from a Soros-funded organization.
Has anyone kept track of how much trouble this one globalist billionaire has caused in his life?
A similar occurrence took place the next night at New York University. The speaker was British-born Canadian author Gavin McInnes, whose commentary routinely appears here. Invited by the College Republicans, he lasted something like 20 minutes in the face of constant heckling and disruptions. Outside, police had to intervene as a near-riot broke out. You can watch the spectacle here — if you’ve a strong stomach. How interesting that so few people involved in these protests can speak a single sentence without torrents of obscenities pouring out. Note, too, the arrangement of balloons into a stuffed animal shape mounted on one guy’s head as he meanders about lecturing anyone who will listen about “white supremacy.”
I’d like someone to tell me how many rights “white supremacists” have taken from anyone this year.
The real fun begins at around 10:15, with a leftie meltdown of volcanic proportions. It makes the one I linked to last week look tame by comparison. She’s screaming at the top of her lungs at police, and then, at 11:06, she drops the real bombshell.
She says she’s a professor. The way she introduces it, is supposed to give her a badge of credibility.
Her name is Rebecca Goyette, and she portrays herself elsewhere as some kind of artist — look at her public Facebook page.
She’s not a real professor, as it turns out (age restricted: again, strong stomachs only!). Maybe, in her delusional leftie-pervert universe, she thinks she’s a professor. Who knows?
Some of the onlookers, having heard her say she’s a professor and taking her at her word (how interesting, that they would do that), are clearly as bemused as I am (“she’s a professor,” says someone, presumably scratching his head).
What she is, is a complete nutjob!
What seems clear is that an increasingly violent and deranged Left appears more determined than ever to shut down all conservative presence on campuses — completely. Their favorite words are now fascist, Nazi, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist.
I guess racism, sexism and homophobia are losing their force. Too many people now see through those.
Richard Spencer, credited with coining the phrase alt-right, was doing an interview in Washington on Inauguration weekend when someone lurched out of the crowd and sucker-punched him in the face — on video, no less!
And again, a loudmouthed celebrity, covered by mainstream media, calls for what would amount to a military coup against the Trump administration — not exclusively in response to Donald Trump’s attempt to protect America’s borders. One need only reflect on the irony: the Left went ballistic when, late in the final Presidential Debate, Trump hesitated to say he would automatically accept the results of a Hillary Clinton victory.
The Left is refusing to accept the Trump victory, and its militancy is getting increasingly dangerous. A journalist and writer I once respected, Chris Hedges, author of the very good War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), now goes into a weekly torrent of hysterics. In his latest, he calls for resistance to make America ungovernable. He calls for nonviolence, as if not realizing either that the Left already crossed that bridge, or that protesters don’t have to engage in open violence to endanger innocent people’s lives when, e.g., they are obstructing highways as they’ve done for the past year now.
Now I’d be the first to admit that Trump’s executive order of Friday, January 27, could have been planned better, e.g., written to exempt green card holders, employees of the U.S. government traveling with passports from the affected nations, and others with permanent residency in the U.S. whom, one can presume, have gone through a rigorous vetting process. Had I been Trump, I would have issued a preliminary statement that the order was coming and given as many people as possible it would likely affect sufficient time to get their ducks in a row. But that’s just me. I think executive orders are, at best, blunt instruments. Trump hardly invented the executive order as a means of governing. I’m not sure a more nuanced and careful approach would have made the slightest difference to the angry, violent Left, though.
I’ve mentioned survivalist writer Brandon Smith’s view that Left and Right are being orchestrated into a head-on violent confrontation. He writes, “Instead of admitting that their ideology is a failure in every respect, [the Left is] doubling down. When this evolution is complete, the Left WILL resort to direct violent action on a larger scale, and they will do so with a clear conscience because, in their minds, they are fighting fascism. Ironically, it will be this behavior by leftists that may actually push conservatives towards a fascist model. Conservatives may decide to fight crazy with more crazy.” As if to confirm Smith’s fears, some idiot Social Justice Warrior threatened this. If he or his buddies actually went through with it, President Trump might see little choice except to send in Homeland Security to deal with the problem. I doubt they would hesitate to use deadly force.
Trump would then be playing into the hands of the globalists just as the Left has been doing. Smith continues, “If under Trump conservatives fall to temptation and exploit the ‘ring of power’ that is government to exert dominance in the name of stopping the Left, then they will ultimately be destroyed as well. In this case history will not remember conservatives as freedom fighters rebelling against globalist machinations, but as evil ‘populists’ that caused global economic collapse and the re-establishment of the institution of fascism. The globalists can swoop in after the dust has settled and use the American collapse fable as a story to tell children for the next century. A reminder that nationalism and sovereignty are harbingers of war and death.”
You see, not all of us are sure about all that Trump is doing. Smith believes he was the globalists’ choice all along. His reasoning is not implausible. Is he “draining the swamp”? Nomi Prins, former banking analyst and strategist turned author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (2009) and All the President’s Bankers (2014), believes the number of Goldman Sachs people in Trump’s administration is more than a mere cause for concern. Prins advocates something Trump has not to my knowledge mentioned: reinstating Glass-Steagall, which would restore the separation between commercial and investment banking. Others on Trump’s cabinet such as billionaire Rex Tillerson (former Exxon/Mobil CEO) are accustomed to getting what they want through top-down decrees. Someone better tell him, what might have kept his employees in line won’t work with the Chinese, and that he needs to not treat them like adolescent school boys needing to be told how to behave.
There may be the need, that is, for a credible critical stance — a credible “Trumpism” other than Donald Trump and his administration: critical of globalism, favorable towards sensible border security, but better thought-out and articulated, and taking note of the things Trump is ignoring or deeming unimportant. I attempted a possible beginning for such a project here (though I must credit the writer who called himself Publius Decius Mus and essays such as this for inspiration).
I stated in my earlier article that Trump’s number one enemies are the globalists, not the Left. The present-day Left, in the U.S. at least, couldn’t tie its collective shoelaces without Soros money or cushy academic positions.
The U.S. national debt, as I write, is $19.97 trillion. Total U.S. indebtedness including unfunded liabilities is, according to some estimates, over ten times that. To the best of my knowledge, Trump has said nothing about this looming debt bomb. He can’t possibly not know about it. I am sure Steve Bannon knows about it. He strikes me as a bright guy. If you factor in the even larger derivatives bubble (larger still; its the exact size appears to depend on whom you consult), we are literally sitting atop the largest set of asset bubbles in world history. Much of what even Trump is planning presupposes that the bubble will last. The problem is, they never do. They always pop sooner or later. Or are popped, when the truly powerful prick them. Something they are quite capable of, as soon as more “populists” are elected (Brandon Smith again).
Marine Le Pen in France who has launched her campaign for the Presidency there as an attack on globalization, radical Islamism, and on calling for a referendum on France’s remaining in the EU. I think she will win. So, I believe, will Geert Wilder, her counterpart in the Netherlands.
The real question: are “populists” being set up to take the fall when the superelite pops the bubble they created?
There is more than a ghost of a chance that we will know before the end of this year! That we will know within four years is probably a given!
The Left is completely unaware of this, of course. Like five-year-olds having temper tantrums when their parents won’t let them play in the street, they have no sense of the real danger. What they have is visibility, due to money, popularity, and the sort of sensationalism that wins visibility these days.
Those of us who are aware of the danger are consigned to Facebook (where we are at the mercy of “algorithms” that weed out unwanted information, so that it simply never appears in newsfeeds), blogs, and sites like this one that may get some Web traffic but ultimately not enough to make a difference. Sad. Truly sad.
© 2017 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved