We are living in unprecedented times.
No, I’m not referring to the Coronavirus pandemic. Historically, humans have faced far worse plagues than Covid-19. Neither am I referring to the recent round of race riots. There were actually 137 violent riots that followed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April of 1968.
I’m referring to the peculiar Democrat reaction to these two events. The infuriating frustration – the utter disgust – that conservatives have collectively experienced over the last several weeks stems from that fact that amid the mass looting and violence, a litany of governors and mayors, all Democrats, refused to do anything about it. As hysterical mobs toppled historical monuments across the country, Democrat lawmakers sided with lawbreakers, throwing law enforcement under the bus. Facemask and social distancing protocols that were considered non-negotiable by tyrannical leftist governors were suddenly and arbitrarily dismissed by those same governors to allow for a wave of wokeness to flood our cities’ streets. Things were so bad in Democrat-run Seattle that the city council actually threatened the mayor with impeachment if she didn’t side with the protestors!
This unprecedent abdication of enforcement authority has placed President Trump in a precarious situation. The refusal of leftist governors and mayors to exercise their enforcement authority within our federal system of delegated jurisdiction has amounted to nothing less than a collective mutiny against the president. At the same time, Trump’s threat to deploy the military was undermined by a defense leadership radically neutered by political correctness. For a time it appeared that Trump could only speak loudly while carrying a flimsy twig.
So what is Trump supposed to do?
The good news is that we are now beginning to see Trump’s strategic pivot in response to this collective insanity. First, Trump signed an executive order which mandates maximum prison sentences of 10 years for those convicted of attempting to desecrate or destroy national monuments, while withholding funds from local governments that fail to protect their own statues. Secondly, Trump has gone through the Department of Homeland security and together they have set up a task force to prevent the destruction and vandalism of statues and monuments commemorating the heritage and history of the United States, and he is working with the Justice Department to deploy agents throughout the nation.
As a result of his efforts, we are beginning to see mass arrests that are striking at the heart of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. The Justice Department announced late last week that they had arrested four men suspected in a failed vandalism attempt targeting the president Andrew Jackson statue in DC’s Lafayette Square. In the process, federal prosecutors arrested what they’re calling a ‘ringleader’ of Antifa who was involved in trying to pull down the Andrew Jackson statue. In Utah, a BLM activist, Jesse Taggart was arrested and charged with attempted aggravated murder, aggravated assault and rioting. In Des Moines, Iowa, law enforcement officers began arresting BLM demonstrators on the state capitol grounds. Police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd which was indeed successfully disbanded. Moreover, federal investigators are even going on Facebook and arresting people for inciting riots on social media. The Department of Homeland Security deployed special federal units to protect monuments over the July Fourth weekend, particularly in Portland, Seattle, and DC. And now, Georgia governor Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency and called up over a thousand National Guard troops to put down BLM violence in Atlanta that resulted in the tragic shooting death of an eight year old girl.
In the process, Trump brilliantly set a trap for the far left with his Mount Rushmore speech. It is one thing for leftists to call for the toppling of local monuments in cities most Americans have never visited. It is quite another to disparage national monuments that virtually all Americans revere. But that is precisely what the left-wing activists disguised as journalists at The New York Times did, and in so doing, they exposed their radical extremism that most in our nation find odious. By contrast, Trump’s soaring speech heralding our nation’s birth, its unparalleled achievements, and the glories of its monuments rendered such leftist radicalism obviously absurd.
All of this shows that President Trump and the GOP have begun to use not only the full force of the law to effectively crush this left-wing lunacy that has been unleashed throughout our nation, but have also begun to counter BLM’s cultural Marxism with an alternative national narrative celebrating our common culture, heritage, and destiny. In so doing, Trump is restoring law and order to our nation, and setting himself up for a huge landslide victory in November!
