Monday, March 14, 2016
To: Friends & Supporters
From: Gary L. Bauer
The Left Attacks
Of all the counterproductive things that have happened in the campaign this year, perhaps the most troubling took place Friday night. A left-wing mob organized by MoveOn.org, activists from the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and a dozen other radical groups, sent thousands of people into the streets of Chicago and inside an arena where Donald Trump was scheduled to speak. Bill Ayers even showed up, too.
The predictable confrontation that followed resulted in the cancellation of the rally and violated the free speech rights of the candidate and thousands of average Americans who came to hear and see him.
People leaving the rally had to walk through a mob of protestors shouting obscenities. The American flag was defaced. Palestinian and Mexican flags were proudly flown. Hundreds of families who had to retrieve their cars from a parking garage were literally prevented from leaving for over an hour because the left’s street troops blocked the exits.
I have a very simple question to pose: What would the reaction have been if thousands of conservatives filled an Obama rally in 2008 or 2012 and the inevitable riot ensued? They would have been called bigots and Nazis. Everyone would have condemned the conservative protestors.
But this weekend, the condemnation was reserved for the candidate and his supporters, not the disruptors.
Some people claim it was provocative for the Trump campaign to even try to hold an event at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Whatever happened to free speech in America?
Surely they understand that the same mobs are shouting down conservatives on college campuses. The same students flying Palestinian flags Friday night are harassing Jewish students, while campus officials look the other way.
The intolerant left is out of control. It is promising more campaign disruptions this year. I suspect it may even attempt to disrupt next year’s inauguration and take to the streets, if necessary, to prevent a new president from reversing many of the policies of the past seven years.
Sadly, good people who ought to know better just empowered those mobs by suggesting that what a conservative says at a rally justifies stifling free speech. This fuzzy thinking undoubtedly contributed to a 22 year-old fanatic rushing the stage at a campaign event in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday. He is already out of jail and being interviewed by CNN.
Tolerating this behavior puts every candidate of both parties in danger.
The Left’s Double Standard
When conservatives engage in normal public policy debate, there is a concerted effort to silence them. When Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was tragically shot, Sarah Palin was blamed because her website talked about “targeting” liberals for defeat. By the way, Gifford’s assailant was an extreme leftist.
When racist white thugs dragged a black man to his death in Texas behind their pickup truck, a horrific murder, the left argued that because conservatives disagreed with hate crimes laws, they were responsible for the murder.
This has been going on for decades. When a homosexual man was murdered in Wyoming in a drug deal gone bad, somehow Dr. James Dobson was responsible.
When Timothy McVeigh, who was certainly no Christian, blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was initially blamed on “hate radio” and Republicans who wanted to reduce the size of government.
To this day when I talk about the violence inherent in radical Islam, the person I am debating often brings up Timothy McVeigh, as if conservatives and Christians are routinely blowing up buildings and engaging in terrorism.
The Intolerant Left
There is a growing movement on the left that seeks to verbally demonize and physically threaten and intimidate leading figures and organizations on the right. It is a subject I have written about repeatedly and has been happening long before Donald Trump was on the scene. It is one of the reasons why no conservative of consequence can speak at a major university without significant controversy and attempts to stop his or her speech.
But for all the talk about Hitler and comparisons to fascism on the right, the only group in America using fascist-like tactics is the left. These tactics include demonizing normal conservative ideas, coupled with regular threats and the actual use of violence.
The use of this demonization against one of the bulwarks of a stable society — law enforcement — has resulted in growing violence against police officers. A police captain was shot near Philadelphia Friday and a young black officer was assassinated in the Washington, D.C., suburbs yesterday.
Ronald Reagan was routinely compared to Hitler. Even when he passed away.
Over the years, the left’s merciless tactics extended to Supreme Court nominees, such as the destruction of Robert Bork, the attempted “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas and the filibuster of Samuel Alito.
A Brief Reminder
Here are a few reminders of the left’s extreme rhetoric and how it has routinely attacked normal conservative thought and activism.
“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. . . I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” — Barack Obama, September 2008.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” — Barack Obama, June 2008.
“In South Africa we’d call it apartheid. In Germany we’d call it Fascism. Here we call it Conservatism.” — Jesse Jackson, January 1995.
“What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” — left-wing protestors marching in New York City, December 2014.
How about the MoveOn.org ads comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler?
One left-wing columnist said such comparisons were too much. But not for the reason you might think: “It’s going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was.”
Let’s not forget the New Black Panthers who stood outside of a Philadelphia polling location in 2008 intimidating voters and got off scot-free.
How about the churches and Mormon temples that were vandalized when pastors defended normal marriage?
How about the threats from left-wing big city mayors to shut down Chick-fil-A restaurants? What about the wannabe mass murderer who stormed the Family Research Council because he was inspired by the left’s “hate” rhetoric against Christians?
The left has been doing this for decades. It owns academia. It owns the popular culture. Conservatism, if the left prevails, will essentially be criminalized.
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