No, the violent uprising in Chicago this weekend was not a spontaneous reaction by concerned citizens to Donald Trump’s scheduled rally there. As with Benghazi, nothing that big ever happens spontaneously. It was organized, apparently by well-established liberal organizations with serious funding behind them. It was an orchestrated attempt to stop a political candidate from speaking, ironically on the grounds that the candidate is some sort of fascist.
But unless you pay every protester, you can’t organize a mob of people who are not willing. These people were very willing, which is why for all the talk about how dangerous Trump’s candidacy supposedly is, there is far more danger in the easy manipulation of ordinary people who can be made to believe things just because everyone else seems to believe them.
The anti-Trump fever is starting to look like one of those situations where a parent leaves a child or a dog in a hot car, and everyone on the Internet believes this gives them license to conduct a digital lynching of that person. In all likelihood, the web warriors don’t know nearly as much about the situation as they think they do, but that scarcely matters. They believe they’ve identified a person of such horrendous character that it gives them not only the right but the duty to let everyone on Earth know of their disgust toward that person.
These people are violators of the mob’s moral standards, and that can be summed up as anything you might do that an Internet mob decides is worthy of mass condemnation. They’ll ruin your career (Darren Wilson). They’ll try to shut down your business (Memories Pizza). They may or may not succeed at their quest to take you down, but they’ll have no fear in trying because they’re always convinced there’s safety in the numbers of a mob.
And at any rate, they’re licensed by the power of groupthink. Everyone knows Trump is a racist! Everyone knows Trump is a fascist! Everyone knows his election would be a global embarrassment, and would spell the end of our constitutional rights, and would give rise to hatred on a massive scale!
Everyone “knows” these things because they keep hearing everyone else say them. It doesn’t mean any of it’s necessarily true. But a group-thinking nation has settled on a narrative, the mainstream media are fully on board. When that happens it’s really not that difficult to organize a mob to act violently on behalf of the notion. It’s reached a fever-pitch at this point, so why not get some blood flowing on its behalf?
As absurd as it sounds, many people get it in their heads that they’re being virtuous with their open expressions of judgment in these situations. The loudest to condemn the Internet’s villain of the moment is the winner of the virtue crown, and Trump has been placed in that villain role about as completely as anyone we’ve ever seen.
Over the past week I’ve written so many columns critical of the Trump critics that I probably sound like a Trump supporter. In fact, I’m strongly leaning toward Ted Cruz. But as a commentator I have to separate that from my honest view of the political atmosphere as I see it. And while I have problems with Trump, and he is not my first choice, I am less troubled by him than I am by the mob mentality that sees people jumping all over each other to prove their fealty to the #NeverTrump hysteria.
Violence like we saw in Chicago doesn’t happen unless people have been manipulated to take part of it. And when the nation as a whole reacts with anything but complete condemnation of such an event, it shows that they too have been manipulated into a suspension of the standards that would normally govern their thinking.
Donald Trump speaking is not a danger to anything. People listening to Donald Trump speak is merely part of this nation’s free and open political process. When you’ve gotten so worked up in a frenzy that you can no longer understand that, you’re the one who’s out of control. Not Donald Trump and not his supporters.
No, the violent uprising in Chicago this weekend was not a spontaneous reaction by concerned citizens to Donald Trump’s scheduled rally there. As with Benghazi, nothing that big ever happens spontaneously. It was organized, apparently by well-established liberal organizations with serious funding behind them. It was an orchestrated attempt to stop a political candidate from speaking, ironically on the grounds that the candidate is some sort of fascist.
But unless you pay every protester, you can’t organize a mob of people who are not willing. These people were very willing, which is why for all the talk about how dangerous Trump’s candidacy supposedly is, there is far more danger in the easy manipulation of ordinary people who can be made to believe things just because everyone else seems to believe them.
