If you’re President Trump, you have to be wondering, “What next?” It wasn’t enough that the administration had to deal with the liberals’ three-year crusade to unseat him — the Russian collusion, an impeachment sham, the deep-state FBI conspiracy.
Then came 2020: the coronavirus, 119,000 deaths, an economic shutdown, and George Floyd. Now, if cities aren’t burned to the ground, they’re becoming part of a “proxy civil war.” It is, the Left smirks quietly, the perfect election storm. But is it enough to win?
Most people watching Seattle, where armed warlords have taken over whole city blocks, aren’t looking at the city with envy. “The rabid foxes are in the hen house,” the Washington Times’s Cheryl Chumley warned. “These are not poor misguided youth exercising their First Amendment rights. These are criminals — violent criminals — intimidating innocent law-abiding citizens… This isn’t America,” she argued. What this is, she said bluntly, “is some third-world chaotic country crap, where loons and drug-addicted deranged and soulless evil rise up and mount an assault on [ordered] society.”
If this is a picture of police-free living, Americans are telling pollsters, count us out. Eight in 10 people don’t just want our law enforcement funded — many want funding increased! They’ve seen the pictures of gun-toting insurgents walling off “autonomous” parts of Seattle lined with signs that say, “You are now leaving the USA.” They don’t want to be the next town with a police chief in front of the cameras saying her teams can’t answer 911 calls for rapes and robberies because the mayor “relented to public pressure” and boarded up the closest precinct. Nor do they want to hear other city leaders, after losing control of their cities, insist this is a “summer love block party” instead of the hostile takeover it is.
Yet when the president steps in and warns Governor Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) to get Seattle under control, what’s the Left’s reaction? “[They say] he’s simply being his usual racist self by trying to shut down the ‘lawful protesters,’ as they’re deemed in the eyes of the Democrats,” Cheryl shook her head. And frankly, she told Sarah Perry on “Washington Watch,” the longer this goes on, the better chance it has to get completely out of hand. “If you don’t think other[s]… are watching CNN right now with interest in planning and plotting similar takeovers of their own, I think you have your head in the sand — because I think this is going to spread as far and wide as the leftist violent thugs can make it.”
As disturbing as the situation is, she points out, there’s something even more concerning — and that’s the complete capitulation on the part of political leaders. “Republicans could be a little bit louder about the problems here,” Cheryl agreed. “But really, the Democrats giving these people voices, treating them as if they’re First Amendment, law-abiding protesters instead of what they really are [is shameful].” The banner of the Democratic Party, she thinks, has truly become “No law, no order — just mayhem.”
On one hand, maybe that makes sense. This stew of unrest and anarchy serves the Left well. If you want to destabilize the country and make it completely ungovernable, Sarah pointed out, “You begin with a pandemic. You send everyone home to shelter in place. You throw in some race riots. Foment it with Antifa vigilantism — and before you know it, you’re losing major metropolitan cities to domestic terrorists.” Suddenly, no one’s paying attention to the Democrats’ mediocre candidate Joe Biden or their subversive attempt to create a nationwide system of mail-in voting.
The Left doesn’t just want a civil war — it needs one. They can’t win on extremism alone. That’s why, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote, “There is no scab they will not pick at, no divide they will not exploit, no controversy they will not gin up to make us hate each other… But we cannot take their bait.”
Our country, and its survival, depend on it.
Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.