We live in an age where a cell phone video can dramatically change public opinion and our national character overnight. While it could take years for such an event to manifest in elections or policies, the incredible tensions and violence surrounding our last election have brought Americans into a new reality.
Since the election, we have seen videos of Trump supporters dragged out of vehicles or beaten bloody and unconscious in the streets. We’ve seen newspaper boxes, trashcans, vehicles and American flags set on fire during left wing riots in the streets. We’ve watched protests where police under the command of liberal city councils and mayors allow groups to block traffic, including ambulances and other emergency vehicles, from reaching their destinations on major interstates.
{mosads}We’ve watched Project Veritas videos where liberal provocateurs plan to incite violence at Trump rallies, gas buildings or trigger sprinkler systems to disrupt pro-Trump gatherings, or commit terrorist acts on subway trains to prevent Trump supporters from assembling in Washington. We also saw the heart-wrenching video of the disabled man tortured mercilessly for days in Chicago by youths proclaiming their opposition to the president.
While not every Trump supporter is innocent or well behaved, we have hardly seen the same level of organized violence that exists on the other side of the aisle.
These crimes are driven by hate and are politically motivated. And they are more than just criminal acts: They represent an assault on the democratic process and the civil rights to which all Americans are entitled.
We are all taught as school children that Americans have the rights to assemble, speak freely, and support whomever we want for public office without threat or duress. To many Americans, it appears that too many are now simply refusing to support those traditional liberties.
But at the same time, Americans are also witnessing the fact that many high profile liberals have been a bit too lackluster in their willingness to condemn all of the violence and mayhem. Many liberals are inciting the violence through their ad hominem attacks, calling the president, his administration, and his tens of millions of supporters “racist” or “hateful.”
When a Trump supporter is accused of being “hateful” by the left, the implied connotation is that the person is as the same as a member of some age-old hate group. A corollary to that claim that is sometimes made is that it is somehow acceptable to perpetrate acts of violence against those with whom one disagrees.
Though the president’s party usually loses congressional seats during midterm elections, Democrats are facing the prospect of losing even more seats in 2018, especially in the Senate, because their movement continues to repel voters with displays of violence, threats, and other bad behavior.
Voters in states such as Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia are all going to decide in the next election whether to send Democratic members back to the Senate. Trump won each of those states by an overwhelming margin.
Will voters who are sick of violence and obnoxious celebrities – let us not forget Madonna’s January call to blow up the White House – reward those members if they stoke, rather than work to diminish, the flames of malcontent?
Realization of that reality is undoubtedly the reason West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin decided to join Republicans this week in voting to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general, despite the fact that Sessions will seek to crack down on some of the very groups fomenting unrest. Now that Sessions has become the nation’s attorney general, it is within his power to prosecute many of the violent rioters, groups, and financiers, potentially on criminal civil rights charges.
Americans are fighting mad at what we’ve seen and heard from leftwing groups and their backers in the establishment media, and the potential for an electoral backlash swinging the pendulum further against Democrats is growing.
William Gheen is the president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, a conservative immigration group representing more than 50,000 members.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.