OPINION:
“Mobocracy” is a word that should inspire fear. Increasingly, however, it’s a reality of life in 21st-century America. Regardless of the outcome of elections, Democrats intend to use the mob to retain and expand their power.
The following happened in roughly the space of a week.
President Biden invited three Tennessee state legislators, two of them expelled by their colleagues, to the White House to celebrate their alleged courage and decry their supposed victimization. The former consisted of the trio taking over the well of the Tennessee House chamber and leading chants to encourage the mob, which had invaded the body, demanding more gun control after the mass shooting at a Nashville Christian school. The perpetrator, shot dead by police, has been described as transgender.
Contrast Mr. Biden’s embrace of leaders of the Tennessee mob with Democrats’ exaggerated outrage over Jan. 6. When it’s against the interests of the Democratic Party, it’s an insurrection. When it furthers its interests, it’s a peaceful protest in defense of democratic values.
Within days of the mob action in Tennessee, an antifa/Black Lives Matter gang shut down a speech by Kristan Hawkins — leader of Students for Life of America — at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Those who had come to hear Mrs. Hawkins’ were met with shouts of “Fascists go home” and “F—- pro-lifers.” Through all of this, the campus police were notably absent, though two who allegedly assaulted pro-lifers were later arrested.
Within days of that atrocity, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines tried to speak at San Francisco State University on why female athletes should not be forced to compete against biological males. Besides being held prisoner in a room barricaded by protesters and called a “f—-ing transphobic bitch,” Ms. Gaines was punched by a man in a dress.
Such scenes are repeated on campuses across the country, especially when the conversation concerns hot-button issues such as abortion, gun control and transgenderism. Administrators who share the mob’s values do nothing to stop it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he hopes to pardon Army Sgt. Daniel Perry, who was railroaded by a George Soros-supported prosecutor and convicted of murder in what was clearly a case of self-defense.
It stems from a July 2020 riot in Austin, when Perry, who was off duty driving an Uber, had his car surrounded by a Black Lives Matter mob that beat on the vehicle. When one of the rioters pointed an AK-47 at Perry, the sergeant shot him.
At the scene, police called it self-defense. The prosecutor has been accused of concealing evidence.
Not only will Democrats not protect us from the mob, but they also won’t allow us to defend ourselves. That’s why they’re obsessed with disarming potential victims.
Democrats have given up on representative government. Those spreading chaos in the streets, on campuses and in legislative chambers are their surrogates.
If Republicans win in 2024, Democrats will ramp up the violence after seeing what they could get away with over the past three years.
The George Floyd riots were a watershed. From New York to Portland, Oregon, Democratic mayors egged on the mob and ordered police to stand down. The result was billions in property damage, police officers assaulted, and a number of homicides.
In Massachusetts, then-Attorney General Maura Healey excused the arson with the comment: “Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow.” Voters in this heavily blue state were so appalled that two years later, they elected Ms. Healey governor.
Democrats have made a deal with the devil.
Over the past two centuries, totalitarian regimes have often been ushered in by mob violence. It happened in the French, Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions when the people decided that dictatorship was preferable to chaos in the streets.
Before it rendered a judgment in the Kyle Rittenhouse case (a forerunner of Perry), the judge read to the jury part of an 1836 speech by President Abraham Lincoln after the lynching of a Black man by a St. Louis mob: “There is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive administers of justice.”
Mob violence should remind us of the darker periods of history when not law but naked force prevailed, and most were at the mercy of belligerent brutes. That’s where the Democratic Party is taking us.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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