RUTHFULLY YOURS

The curious case of Donald Trump vs. Riots Inc. puts us in mind of Henry Kissinger’s assessment of the Iran–Iraq War: It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.

Instead, the loss is being suffered by the United States and its political institutions.

Politics-by-riot, and politics-by-threat-of-riot, is unworthy of the oldest and finest democratic republic on earth. Politics-by-assault isn’t just a crime, though such crimes should be robustly prosecuted: It is an attack on the institutions that make American self-governance possible as much as an attack on individual speakers or protesters. Among those institutions are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. The Bill of Rights guarantees protection of those rights from government encroachment, but they also must be defended from mob-ocracy, which we have seen more than enough of in the past year, from Ferguson to Washington.

Donald Trump canceled a rally in Chicago after protests that were intended to pressure him into doing so. Which is to say, protests that were not oriented toward political expression but toward its suppression. If you have any doubt of that, consider that the protesters chanted “We stopped Trump!” after they succeeded in out-bullying the big bully of Fifth Avenue. Trump, for his part, played the martyr — a cynical posture for a man who fantasizes in public about using the law to punish journalists who displease him. A protester disrupted a planned Trump event in Ohio and later described his goal as to “take his podium away from him and take his mic away from him.” Another act of protest oriented not toward political expression but toward its suppression. That protester has been charged with disorderly conduct, and the evidence is plain enough that he should be convicted.

Trump — Saddam Hussein to the ayatollahs of political correctness on the other side — is of course far from blameless in all this. That is not to say that Trump’s irresponsible, wild-eyed, and meat-headed rhetoric, which has included explicit calls for violence against his critics, is responsible for having provoked the protests. Rather, Trump’s rhetoric has been unworthy of a presidential candidate — and unworthy of an American — in and of itself.

The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally in Chicago on Friday was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas.

Even so, it is a particularly poisonous assault on the American body politic that imperils the nation’s most important free institution – the ballot.

“The meticulously orchestrated #Chicago assault on our free election process is as unAmerican as it gets,” tweeted actor James Woods. “It is a dangerous precedent.”

This so-called protest, and the disruptions at subsequent Trump events over the weekend, were not spontaneous, organic demonstrations. The usual culprits were involved behind the scenes. The George Soros-funded organizers of the riot at the University of Illinois at Chicago relied on the same fascistic tactics the Left has been perfecting for decades – including claiming to be peaceful and pro-democracy even as they use violence to disrupt the democratic process.

Activists associated with MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, all of which have been embraced by Democrats and funded by radical speculator George Soros, participated in shutting down the Trump campaign event. Soros recently also launched a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada through a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The title is a characteristic misdirection since Trump supports immigration that is legal. It’s the invasion of illegals who have not been vetted and are filling America’s welfare rolls and jails that is the problem.

Among the extremist groups involved in disrupting the Trump rally in Chicago were the revolutionary communist organization ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), National Council of La Raza (“the Race”), and the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Rights Reform. President Obama’s unrepentant terrorist collaborator Bill Ayers, who was one of the leaders of Days of Rage the precursor riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, also showed up to stir the pot.

Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro have tendered their resignations to the management at Breitbart.com over the site’s handling of the Corey Lewandowski/Michelle Fields imbroglio, Rosie Gray and McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed News reported late Sunday night. And more resignations are likely in the coming days and weeks, according to their report.

Fields and Shapiro join Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella, who left the company on Friday, citing as his reason the website’s inadequate handling of Donald Trump’s campaign manager’s alleged assault on Fields last week.

Bardella told CNN’s Don Lemon on Saturday that he thought the website has been “looking for a reason to disprove something” even though the evidence strongly supports Fields’ version of the story. When Lemon asked Bardella if he thought Breitbart was lying, he bluntly answered, “Yes, I am.”

BuzzFeed reports that Fields and Shapiro informed Breitbart’s chairman, Steve Bannon, of their decisions Sunday night.

“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”

A Trump administration may well see needed reforms left undone and unneeded populist measures promoted. As this most unlikely of candidates draws closer to the GOP’s nomination, one thing is certain: Whatever the mogul’s flaws, and they are many, he is less dangerous than Hillary

ships riggedBeing a great aficionado of Patrick O’Brien’s tales of the Georgian Royal Navy, I beg the reader’s indulgence of my using a metaphor from that era. Imagine the American Right to be in the position of a Royal Navy captain of the Napoleonic Wars era, who has found himself trapped in a narrow strait of water blocked at one end by a strong French fleet, and at the other by a large ship which he recognizes as belonging to an infamous and eccentric buccaneer. Escape might still be possible by skirting past the pirate, but is growing more improbable by the moment. The crew, so loyal and steadfast in the past, is becoming spooked. Some are even jumping overboard and swimming toward the pirate vessel, hoping to join him, and the corpulent purser has absconded with a ship’s boat, rowing in the pirate’s direction.

The choices are grim. To surrender to the French is an appalling prospect, meaning four or even eight years in a prison hulk. However, the pirate is so eccentric and unpredictable that he might just kill you for surrendering to him. You call a council of war with your remaining officers and hear their opinions. One counsels that you take to the remaining boats and set the ship on fire, rather than surrender her to either. That would deny the ship to your enemies but leave you adrift and helpless. You might indeed make your way to shore and slowly, painfully use salvaged supplies to build a new ship, but that is uncertain, and would certainly leave you stranded for a long time.

Pity those poor Americans in this presidential election year. In one corner, the bizarre figure of Donald Trump. In the other, the woman who excused her husband’s sexual predations, achieved nothing in the Senate and made cowardice her guide as Secretary of State. Some choice, eh?

Listening to one of Hillary Clinton’s stump speeches as she pursues the Democrats’ presidential nomination, you could be forgiven for suspecting that, taken at her word, she has been personally responsible for the liberation of women. In truth, her vapid and dismissive response to Bill Clinton’s history of abusive affairs likely set the women’s movement back many years. Hillary’s citing of a fabled “vast right-wing conspiracy” somehow, according to a compliant press corps, made Bill’s appalling history seem a mere side issue, all the allegations presented as no more than mere excuses to bring him down. Lies under oath, innovative uses for cigars and interns — even rape if you accept the word of at least two alleged victims and the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote of having spoken at length to a third.

But none of this bothered Mrs Clinton, who has continued to present herself as the essence and hope of womanhood’s advancement. What she ignores are the key advances that have made life better for women and enabled them to take up opportunities previously un-achievable or forbidden. Legislation for compulsory school education for all children in the late 19th Century arguably opened the way. Those educated women would grow up to demand the vote, more control of money, and less back-breaking domestic drudgery.

The story has it that during the George H.W. Bush administration, James Baker proposes to his boss an idea that would go against Israeli interests. “The Jews aren’t going to like it,” President Bush says. Mr. Baker replies: “They don’t vote for us anyway—screw ’em!” Fast forward 15 years, when Rahm Emanuel proposes a different idea to his boss that would also go against Israeli interests. “The Jews aren’t going to like it,” President Obama says. Mr. Emanuel replies: “They vote for us anyway—screw ’em!”

Such, one might say, are the advantages of bloc voting for ethnic groups. Just as Democratic politicians assume the support of black voters, the Jews have been in the pocket of the Democratic Party at least as far back as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and though there are few Jews alive today who were old enough to have voted for FDR, they, the Jews, are still in that pocket. This despite the fact that we now know that FDR was not such a grand friend to the Jews, for he did nothing to stop or even slow the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, and instead, when told by Rabbi Stephen Wise of the death camps, counseled silence on the subject. CONTINUE AT SITE