Some people are their own worst enemy — unable to get out of their own way, derailing their own good opportunities, large or small. You know the type — late to the interview for the dream job, says something stupid when meeting someone they’re attracted to, or just generally doing or saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
It’s just how some people are. They can’t help themselves.
Democrats can’t help themselves either, and in much the same way.
These anti-Israel protests across the country are telling. They are also self-inflicted wounds for Democrats, because they are alienating far more people than they’re attracting.
Democrats are great at protests and, as the saying goes, “mostly peaceful” riots. They keep their base riled up to the point of boiling over to keep it motivated to “act” against Republicans.
Normally, that motivation is against police officers, a group the average extremist Democrat has no problem disliking or justifying hatred for. Police officers come in every size, shape and (most importantly) color. While the active riots against police are usually race based (as in Ferguson) they aren’t always (see George Floyd). It’s the authority they mobilize these mobs against.
Since Occupy Wall Street 13 years ago, protests that are “mostly peaceful riots” have become the social events of leftists’ various seasons. It’s part of the basic human desire to belong. No one in the political tribe wants to be left out.
The more “connected” people are through technology, the more isolated and lonely many have become. Public protests can give people, especially young people without children, a sense of purpose they crave but otherwise cannot find.
That makes these protests against Israel personal to participants — it’s likely the closest thing to kinship that many of them have felt in a long time, if ever.
But that feeling is fleeting. If you show up for reasons other than strident devotion to the cause, all the drum-circling and chanting for the destruction of Israel and America can only go on for so long before it rings hollow. As with the addict who needs even more to achieve the same high, escalation is needed.
These crowds are the perfect combination of arrogance and ignorance. They know everything, which means no one is going to tell them anything, especially what they don’t know. Those two elements are, in the proper combination, dangerous.
You see this in the rhetoric. Noted Israel critic and professor Norman Finkelstein showed up to show protestors that they could broaden the tent by making a simple semantical change in their mob chant. They could remove the bloodthirsty, genocidal part, “From the river to the sea,” which implies the ethnic cleansing of Israel, and replace it with a simple call for liberation, “Palestinians will be free!”
They of course rejected this advice and immediately returned to calls for genocide. The combination of ignorance and arrogance means they aren’t about to be told anything by anyone.
Democrats created this mob in two ways. First, through a failed education system more interested in teaching kids how to respect pronouns than to learn history. Second, they created it by encouraging previous riots and unrest.
The power of condemnation is only useful when engaged, otherwise it’s just passive support. Democrats refused to condemn this mob when it took over parts of various campuses. Democrats refused to condemn them when they chanted racist, anti-Semitic and anti-American mantras. They remained silent as violent rhetoric morphed into physical violence.
Only now, when it’s showing up in polling, where four in five Americans support Israel over Hamas, are they beginning to call for order to be restored. Not when Jewish students were blocked from accessing areas of a campus for which they pay tuition. Not when Jewish students were forced to return to remote learning by antisemitic threats. Not when violence against police reared its ugly head or campus property was damaged. Only when the polls started to turn, and this turned out to be a measurable political liability, did the calls for order emerge.
A progressive activist mob is very easy to create. They always have professional protestors at the ready. But it’s nearly impossible to control. Past mobs served purposes that were effective electorally to Democrats. This one does not.
The American people support Israel and oppose terrorists. No interpretive dance is going to change that. But Democrats can’t shut this mistake down without losing the radicals in their party whom they have now allowed to become so whipped up. Dearborn, Michigan, would be more in play were these mobs never engaged than it will be after they’re shut down.
Meanwhile, blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin are now seeing at work the intended recipients of their hard-eared tax dollars through student loan forgiveness.
Democrats couldn’t help but embrace the far left when these protests started. Now they can’t help themselves at all, no matter what happens. Hatred is a great motivator, but the question is always, to what end? Democrats are about to find out.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).