Election 2016 Part 4: Left-wing Anguish, Hate and Violence

In the previous installment of the Election 2016 series, I discussed hazards to conservatives and conservatism from the ascendancy of Trump to highest office. Now let’s look at what’s happening on the left. To summarize, quite a lot of people need to be taught, as they should have been by parents, how to behave when things don’t go their way.

THE ANGUISHED LEFT

Liberals immediately began weeping and gnashing teeth over how such a horror can take place. Naturally, being driven by emotion and feelings more than rationality and reason, many leftists dove straight into over-the-top, “I can’t cope!” type melodrama on social media, and posts to the effect of, “Now is not the time for kindness and reconciliation, not yet.” Not the time for kindness? Wow. I feel so sorry for those consumed by such bitterness.

Then there were the soft, pampered, coddled, overly tender little snowflakes at colleges around the country whose precious little naive worldviews have no conceptions for real-world harshness and developments that don’t go their way. Emotion, not rationality, reason and logic, drive every fiber of thought. This is another existence (and it’s not life, but existence) for which I have profound pity. It only creates more self-made victims. How exquisitely ironic and fitting that so many have adopted diaper pins as their collective pity-party symbol. And now we even have a gaggle of left-wingers ironically jumping on the bandwagon of a new Red Scare — which looks, sounds and smells exactly like the pattern of conspiracy theory-mongering they accuse the right of doing.

Many on the left cannot comprehend that their party (political party as opposed to pity party, though there is currently little difference) put forth a deeply, deeply flawed candidate infested with corrupted ethics and rotten to the core. Instead they launch bogeyman conspiracy theories and desperate stabs in the dark to blame the FBI director, who spinelessly failed to recommend prosecution for stuff that would have landed a mere proletariat like me in jail by now, the third-party candidates (bullshit…they took from Trump as well!), “racist and xenophobic” bogeymen under every bed, and all manner of other lame excuses for the sorry, sad-sack performance of their own candidate and repudiation of their ideals in the most critical parts of the electoral marketplace.

THE HATEFUL AND SOMETIMES VIOLENT LEFT [Or: Yes, I was in Portland!]

Even before the election, various incidents of violence against Trump supporters (another example, among many) and destruction of property sneaked through the media; who knows what happened that was not widely publicized.

Fortuitously, I was in downtown Portland on unrelated business on election night, and on the next, spent a time out there observing the “civil disobedience”–deliberately embedded for an hour or more within the protestors, who had no idea I was an unsympathetic infiltrator. Here’s what I posted to Facebook friends from the streets, just upwind of tear gas and listening to both the flash/bang grenades and megaphone demands from a wave of law enforcement:

I wandered through some of it. Tons of cops and choppers everywhere. Tear gas and flash-bang devices on occasion but nothing unmanageable. Stoner “riots” are entertaining and not very dangerous. These hipsters have trouble bench-pressing a phone book, much less hurting anybody.
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Yes, it appears some of these morons did break stuff. Cops mostly were dispersing and not arresting people.

Understanding urban meteorology/airflow does help one to stay upwind of the tear gas.
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There definitely was an element that had cell phones ready and waiting [for cops to make a mistake]– as if a form of wishful entrapment.
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[Earlier, on the opposite side of the river:] I was shooting calm-looking water reflectives while standing under the bridge, right alongside a group of ~100 people singing, chanting and beating drums around a makeshift bonfire. Cops came and dispersed them right after I was done. At least they weren’t breaking stuff like those anarchist idiots downtown!

However, on the two following nights after I left, the protests did get physically violent in a few locales of Portland, and I would attribute that more to out-of-town and out-of-state professional paid agitators that we’ve seen in other civil disturbances in places like North Dakota, Ferguson and Baltimore. After the surprise election results, it took some time to get the hired hooligans into town.

My end report: Most of it was civil, but not all. The cops did an amazing job considering a small percentage of the crowd consisted of anarchist thugs breaking stuff, setting fires and hurling objects. Far larger numbers were spewing hate speech directed at at Trump and his supporters. How ironic it was to see people yelling “Love trumps hate,” while carrying “F*** Trump!” signs. Even worse scenes unfolded in other cities such as Oakland, where police endured barrages of bottles, rocks, and Molotov cocktails.

I did not realize that “Love trumps hate” involves destruction and violence.

Want more evidence of hypocrisy? Over half the arrested protestors in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon! If you don’t vote, you have no credibility at all in protesting the results. Go home and play on your PlayStation whilst choking down those kale smoothies.

As a third-party voter and an eyewitness to what happened one night in Portland, I can assure you BOTH sides have a lot of hate and intolerance to weed out of their ranks, not just the so-called “alt-right” as claimed by so-called “progressives”. The vitriol spewing from the left only reinforces, in Trump supporters’ eyes, their decision to vote for him. Is that your goal?

WISE ADVICE

Those who protested the election results really need to heed the words of the President for whom they voted last time, applied to themselves. As a reminder:

“You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about. Go out there and win an election.”
— Barack Obama, 2012

Remember? Or is what’s good for one shoe not applicable to the other?

And oh by the way–stop breaking stuff and trying to hurt people. That also hurts credibility. Ever hear of Martin Luther King and his rightful advocacy of non-violent protest? We also have seen false-flag “hate” incidents (for example) committed by the left, and even before this election cycle. Those who commit false-flag crimes for propaganda truly are a “basket of deplorables”.

Assassination wishes against the President-elect also exploded across Twitter and other social-media commentary spaces. Death threats are evil, criminal, dignify no further exposure, and will not be legitimized by re-posting here. You easily can find more than enough if you try, because regardless of any lip service to the contrary, results (which are what matters) show Twitter corporately cares nothing about being a willing vector for the threat to commit a Federal capital crime. These illustrate the extreme yet still present element of the Left that need to be policed by the party that preaches peace and tolerance.

In the next chapter of this set of BLOG entries, I’ll turn to the more thoughtful, rational element of the left wing and offer credit where it is due.