The Left Attacks
Screenshot: CNN Report on liberal protesters shutting down Trump Chicago Rally |
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 protesters 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 protesters.
But this weekend, the condemnation was reserved for the candidate and his supporters, not the disrupters.
I expected this from big media and left-wing politicians, the Clinton campaign and, of course, the Sanders campaign. What was so demoralizing was to hear some GOP candidates and commentators joining the cascade of criticism.
Some people claim it was provocative for the Trump campaign to even try to hold an event at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Are we going to buy into the left's idea that WE are the problem?
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.
These are the same people who physically threatened me at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, and who nearly ruined the 2008 convention in Minneapolis. Cleveland, which is hosting this year's convention, will be an armed camp.
But while these examples are in the past, I have no doubt the same kind of mob will torment any Republican who is nominated this year. They will attempt to disrupt the inauguration and they will take to the streets, if necessary, to prevent a conservative president from reversing the damage of the past seven years.
Sadly, in their desire to stop Trump, good people who ought to know better just empowered those mobs by suggesting that what a conservative candidate says at a rally justifies stifling free speech. Surely we know by now that the left thinks everything we say is "hate speech."
This fuzzy thinking undoubtedly contributed to a 22 year-old fanatic rushing the stage at a Trump 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 Republicans disagreed with hate crimes laws, we 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.
A Few Truths - There is a growing movement on the left that seeks to verbally demonize and physically threaten and intimidate political 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 Republican of consequence can speak at a major university without significant controversy and attempts to stop his or her speech.
I'd like to offer a few truths that I hope we can all agree on.
Truth Number 1: There is no possible nominee for the Republican Party who could be as bad as the certainty of what a Hillary Clinton Administration would do to everything we hold dear.
Truth Number 2: The only group in America using fascist-like tactics is the political 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.
I could fill pages with the rhetoric of Obama, Clinton, Louis Farrakhan, the Black Lives Matter movement and countless others demonizing the police. Every day, every Republican should be condemning that rhetoric and its consequences.
Truth Number 3: Ninety-nine percent of what is happening now is not specific to just one GOP contender. Ronald Reagan was routinely compared to Hitler. Even when he passed away. Sarah Palin was politically destroyed by a constant barrage of false left-wing attacks.
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.
"Republican flag and the Nazi flag fly side by side." -- Julian Bond, former leader of the NAACP, February 2006.
"What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" -- left-wing protesters 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. Hillary Clinton, if elected, will finish the job Barack Obama started seven years ago.
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Gary Bauer is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families
Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, left attacks, liberal protesters, Donald Trump, Chicago Rally To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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