As the radical hope of the 1960s withered into the radical burnout of the 1970s, leftists turned to violence. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the FALN planted bombs, murdered cops, and robbed banks in the supposed service of political revolution. Looking back on those years, many of the participants in far-left political violence recalled it as a period of desperation and madness. Twenty years later, being a violent radical was an embarrassing memory. In interviews about their past with the journalist Bryan Burrough, old radicals used words like “deluded” to describe their younger selves. “It’s just so absurd I participated in all this,” the former Weather Underground bombmaker Cathy Wilkerson said, sitting in a Brooklyn diner with her grandson.
The turn to violence and rage wasn’t the moment of rising power — it was the moment of desperation. The New Left watched Americans turn to Governor Reagan and President Nixon, saw that their project of political transformation had failed, and lashed out as a bitter reaction. They attacked because they had lost.
History is a cycle, and here we are again: They’re attacking now because they have lost again. As the dumbest people in the history of the universe fight ICE and Border Patrol officers in the streets and engage in ludicrous warrior cosplay with the plastic whistles they somehow regard as symbols of heroism, they aren’t demonstrating that the country is on their side. Instead, they’re proving, with the greatest possible clarity, that they know the argument is over. The country isn’t with them. Recent polling headline: “Majority of Americans Support ICE Carrying out the Trump Immigration Agenda.” The battle has moved to the streets because the conversation is finished, the answer has been given, and they don’t like the answer.
Americans see why Joe Biden opened the border: A massive flood of illegal immigrants is a client class for the corruption of the Democratic Party’s revived Tammany Hall political model, and Miracle-Gro for big government. Surging blue state spending falls into place inevitably behind the effort to provide free food, clothing, housing, medical care, and every other free thing you can think of, for Democratic pet groups. The California state legislature’s legislative analyst is warning that the state is on a path to near-term insolvency; the sociopathic halfwit Democratic governor brags about the billions of dollars the state spends on free healthcare for illegals.
The corrupt free money agenda, the emerging insolvency crisis, and the fetishization of “our undocumented neighbors” is all the same thing. Americans don’t want it, and know we can’t afford it. The end. The desperation of petulant anti-ICE activists kicking cars full of federal agents or gaggling up around federal buildings isn’t a sign of a powerful opposition. It’s a sign that the Trump administration is fighting a gang of adult children who can’t and won’t prevail in any serious fight.
And yet the website of the narrative-making New York Times, on Wednesday morning, led with a cluster of headlines about “the ICE uproar” and the Trump administration backing down: “How Trump Realized He Had a Big Problem in Minneapolis,” for example, and “Why Did the Trump Administration Silence Bovino on Social Media?” The Substack journalist Alex Berenson similarly warns that “President Trump knows he has to change course,” as America panics over ICE. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has to retreat, as if retreating is the path to victory.
If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Throughout the first year of Trump’s second term, Trump acted and the left reacted. Whatever anyone said, they were fighting inside a narrative frame that the administration established. Today, the momentum has shifted. Endlessly re-arguing details about ICE shootings is arguing inside the framework of people like the repellent Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, who says that the story of the moment is that “they are killing us in the streets.”
The reality is that Joe Biden’s open border is producing a predictable reaction, Democrat-run places are racing toward financial collapse, ruinous blue state fraud is metastasizing everywhere, and Americans support a restoration of lawful immigration as an alternative to the unmanaged flood of people who show up wanting endless sums of free government money. But a president who sat in the driver’s seat for a year is now sitting in the back seat, complaining at the driver. He’s reacting. To borrow from an old panic, he needs to leap over the barrier and grab the steering wheel again.
The left is losing. Treat them like losers.
Read the full article here
