Totalitarian

Writing in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen comments on the ever-continuing condemnation of Donald Trump due to the "violence" that has occurred at a few of his rallies. Like Theissen, I am no fan of Trump and believe that his stump rhetoric is shallow, often ill-considered, and divisive.

But something much bigger is going on, and it has little to do with Trump. Thiessen comments:

What we are witnessing is the latest example of the American left’s totalitarian instinct to shut down speech that it finds abhorrent. Trump is not the only speaker to be driven off a college campus in recent years. In 2013, student protesters forced Ben Carson to cancel his planned commencement speech at Johns Hopkins University. In 2014, student activists forced Brandeis University to cancel a commencement-day speech by author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Also in 2014, protesters forced former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to cancel her commencement speech at Rutgers University, declaring that “war criminals shouldn’t be honored” by the school.

What do these speakers all have in common? They are a) black and b) conservative. If the Trump protests were about race, then why are left-wing activists equally insistent on stopping black speakers with views they don’t like? Rice didn’t call for a Muslim ban, but she is just as unacceptable to the radical left as Trump.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, "violence" can take many forms—not all physical. Far-left "activists" do "violence" to one of the most important rights we all have—free speech. And by the way, those who argue that the leftists are exercising their right to free speech are dangerously naive or incurably stupid. Shouting down a speaker whose views differ from one's own, creating chaos inside a venue that hosts that speaker, verbally intimidating attendees by moving into their personal space with the sole intent to provoke violence, and then whining about the rare physical response to these actions when it does occur is S.O.P. for the hard left. It works only because those who rightly condemn Trump for inflammatory rhetoric remain largely silent when leftists do things that are at least as provocative.

What is even worse, is that driven by their anti-Trump mindset, members of the GOP establishment piled on, without also adequately commenting on the "violence" perpetrated by the totalitarian left. In my view, the "violence" perpetrated by leftists in an attempt to silence a candidate is the big story, not some ill-considered Trump comment made on the stump.

One can only wonder how the media would react if a right-wing group shut down a Bernie Sanders rally. That hasn't happened, but the left-wing group BLM did just that and because BLM is left-wing, there was little commentary of the underlying "violence" they perpetrated on Bernie. Thiessen comments:

... Unlike Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who let Black Lives Matter protesters take away his microphone — Trump does not back down when people try to stop him from speaking. His supporters see a man who stands up for himself and believe he won’t let the United States get pushed around either.

No group—right or left—should be allowed to "push around" a public speaker without condemnation from everyone who values free-speech. There has been plenty of condemnation of Trump, but the leftist groups that are working hard to silence him and intimidate his supporters are doing so with relative impunity. They, like Trump, are bullies, and they need to be called out.