Are the Trump haters creating 1968 all over again?聽聽
The professional left is busy resisting all things Trump. Leftists are collecting millions of dollars, having meetings to plot their revenge for his victory over Hillary Clinton. Their hardcore activists are busy organizing, hiring, and training protesters; having signs printed; and, in some cases, buying all black outfits, including masks. They send their thugs to pro-Trump events to be purposefully violent, knowing that anti-Trump violence will make the news. Their belief is that by creating chaos anywhere they can, their campaign against Trump will take root, and his supporters will desert him and follow them.
In their dreams!
"Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality." –Nathan Hill, The Nix
The above excerpt from Nathan Hill's book is from a chapter on the protests that turned the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago into what the protesters called their "revolution." Students chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min" and "kill the pigs" marched in the streets. The police and the National Guard were on hand.
Reading about it now is to see that we are reliving those days; only the names of protesters have changed. What was then called the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Tom Hayden's Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party (Yippies), and Women Strike for Peace is now called Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Antifa.
The enormous difference between then and now? The police in Chicago were overly zealous in their efforts to control the crowds. They were scared. The calculated rumor mill perpetrated by the activists had made so many threats that law enforcement was prepared for all manner of violence. The students enjoyed rumor-spreading but had no intention of employing or means to employ such brutality. Mayhem, yes. Terrorism, no. But getting the police to overreact was part of the plan. So along with the National Guard, law enforcement outnumbered the protesters by far. And many among the police were vicious with permission. Even Dan Rather was roughed up!
Mayor Daley was proud of himself. He had fomented much of the violence and knocked it down hard.
Today, our police, our National Guard, and our military in general are constrained by rules the police and guardsmen of 1968 could not have imagined. The pendulum has swung far from 1968. The police today have their hands tied behind their backs, their use of defensive weapons constrained to the point that they are sitting ducks, and their ability to enforce both state and federal law restricted to the point of absurdity. Almost any act of defense of the citizenry is subject to investigation if an official complaint is made by a perpetrator, a family member, or a witness wielding a cell phone. And that complaint, no matter how ridiculous, carries the day.
But not everything is so different from 1968. Those protests, all that violence displayed on television, despite the small numbers of Americans they represented, ensured Nixon's re-election. The folks in flyover country, then as now, were repulsed by the behavior of what seemed like, thanks to television, tens of thousands of young people. The students then opposed the war because they opposed the draft. They had no idea of the barbarism of communism; they embraced the counter-culture because it was the hip thing to do. Many of them were manipulated into the "movement" just as so many young people today have been maneuvered into anti-Trumpism without actually knowing anything about him.
Today, mind-numbed snowflakes on college campuses who, for calculated reasons, have not been taught to think for themselves before they arrive at university oppose Trump out of sheer ignorance. They read a headline on a blog and believe it, no matter how ludicrous. Trump's a bigot. Trump's a racist. Trump's Hitler, an anti-Semite. There is not an iota of evidence to support any of those allegations. They believe what fits with their carefully crafted-by-the-left image of him and discard any facts that do not align with that image.
It appears that nearly fifty years of leftist control of higher education has done its intended damage; a majority of young students have no ability to think critically and so are easily indoctrinated by Marxist professors. They are unable to discern the difference between actual knowledge and the nonsense that is the tyranny of political correctness with regard to all things race, class, and gender. Anti-Trumpism has taken over college campuses across the nation. It has infected city councils, boards of education, the state assemblies of blue states like California. As always, the Democrats in Congress are of one collective mind: resist, foil, and destroy Trump. They do not care about the country. Led by the oleaginous Chuck Schumer, they have set out to torpedo the Trump administration no matter the cost to the American people.
We are a conservative nation, the country of our Founders. That is why Nixon won in 1968 and why Trump won now. It's 1968 all over again. Only the proliferation of media has changed the rules of the game. There were only three networks then. Today those networks have no credibility. They are arms of the Democratic Party, and everyone knows that. They can pump up the "resistance" all they want. The people who voted against their Marxist agenda know better. Common sense reigns. These oppositional Democrats and their assembled groups of activists are the drop of water in the bucket, in the lake.