Two things I kept seeing on Monday, the eve of what might or might not be history being made in America (and not in a good way), tell me that we’re not as well-positioned on the right as we should be.
First is the exhortation, made first (I guess) by Donald Trump, that non-Democrat Americans should take to the streets in protests and demonstrations in the event New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg follows through on the cockamamie idea of indicting and seeking the arrest of the former president.
No. No, no, no, and hell no.
Do NOT go and protest if Bragg follows through on this provocation. Stay your butt home.
They WANT you to protest. If you do, they will send in the agents provocateur and they will find a way to turn things ugly. And then the same sort of Soros-funded slimeball who’s the DA in your nearest big city just like Bragg is in Manhattan, the wolf in sheep’s clothing who actively panders to the criminal class at the expense of victims and legitimate businesses and taxpaying citizens like you, will come after you on “domestic terrorism” charges just like Merrick Garland and the politicized and tyrannical Justice Department in Washington went after the Jan. 6 protesters.
You’re unacceptably likely to end up in a jail cell in a blue city with a flaming leftist judge denying you bail and a suddenly energized prosecutor more interested in ruining your life than he is in putting rapists and carjackers away.
And whatever you do, don’t protest in New York. Kathy Hochul, Eric Adams, and Alvin Bragg are literally salivating at the opportunity to lock you up in some Château d’If on the Hudson. Their ideas for due process for you are not the same as your ideas.
Or you can do your demonstration in the suburbs where you’re safe. And if you do that, nobody outside of your Facebook friends will even know and you will make zero difference in the world.
The Right doesn’t protest. The Right doesn’t like doing the things that make protesting effective. There have been people for 20 years attempting to graft Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals onto the conservative movement, and it really doesn’t work.
Why? Because most of our people aren’t losers who sit around with nothing to do, and most of our people can’t afford to languish in jails. Most of our people have families depending on them and household budgets that don’t involve spending tens of thousands of dollars in essentially optional legal fees defending against the felony charges visited upon, for example, Mark Houck and his family or the McCloskeys of St. Louis — who defended their property AGAINST protesters and look what they got for their trouble.
No. It doesn’t work for us.
And what we found is that Alinskyite community organizing and demonstrations are wholly ineffective against Democrats who are willing to persecute the activists the way Team Biden did following the Jan. 6 fiasco. The thing to remember is that Gandhi’s peaceful tactics in working to secure India’s independence would only have worked on the British; asked about those tactics, Adolf Hitler said his solution would have been to shoot Gandhi.
That isn’t to equate today’s Democrats with Hitler or the Nazis, per se, but it is to note that you need a very specific value set in order to maintain a respect for rights and the rule of law in the face of someone engaged in a political demonstration counter to your worldview, and there is very little current evidence that today’s Democrats won’t send in the brute squad.
Or, as the addlepate current president has noted, the F-15s.
Don’t demonstrate. But if Bragg attempts to arrest Trump, do something smarter and more consequential.
Which is to declare economic war on New York City. Boycott every company you can that is headquartered in New York. Don’t watch any TV networks headquartered there. Dump the NFL and NBA. Pull your money out of Wall Street or New York banks if you can. Don’t travel to the Big Apple, obviously. No more hot dogs from Nathan’s. And much, much more.
Make it hurt, as permanently as you can.
Will that change Alvin Bragg’s mind? No. But that’s why it’s worth doing. Low-life political hacks like him don’t deserve to ride on the back of the economic activity happening in that city, and so that economic activity should shut down until he’s gone.
That’s a bigger ask than that you spend a couple hours chanting mean things and waving a sign at some protest, but it’s a lot smarter and more impactful. Especially since the Alvin Braggs of the world are already killing blue hellholes like New York; all you’re doing is accelerating the crash.
The other thing that shows the Right isn’t where it needs to be is this screeching about Ron DeSantis and his apparently insufficient takedown of Bragg on Monday. If you haven’t seen it, this is what DeSantis said:
JUST IN – Governor Ron DeSantis responds to reports of a possible Trump indictment.
"The Manhattan District Attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor…They weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society…The Soros District Attorneys are a menace to society!" pic.twitter.com/h7VN48XBV2
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 20, 2023
This was somehow not good enough, and it tells me you’ve got some really bad negotiators on the hardcore Trump team.
DeSantis trashed Bragg. He said he’s a Soros slimeball who won’t prosecute criminals but will go to the mattresses against a political adversary. And DeSantis denounced the politicization of DA offices, noting that he’s proud to have cashiered a Sorosite ne’er-do-well (Andrew Warren) for the same kinds of abuses. That’s a good statement.
Did he crack wise about the underlying incident that produced these stupid trumped-up (yes, that pun was intentional) charges? Of course he did. He’s entitled to. Trump’s called him a groomer and endorsed Charlie Crist as a better governor than DeSantis, for crying out loud, which are indefensible and stupid statements and make DeSantis’ obligation to stand with him quite limited.
DeSantis also is getting trashed for supposedly implying that prosecutorial misconduct by Bragg’s office is not a problem. What it’s pretty clear the Florida governor was saying is that it isn’t a problem until it is; meaning that until there’s an indictment and an attempted arrest, this is still a theoretical exercise and not something the grownups should get overly torqued-up about.
This is a profound case of “take the win.” The fact that the hardcore Trump crowd apparently can’t do that isn’t a good thing.
Because we are not going to beat these tyrants, these saboteurs of American society who busily shoot cannonballs into the edifice of law and reason, with petty rivalries and ineffective counter-woke virtue signaling. The non-Democrats had better learn to stand strong and make it count.
And what we’re seeing this week, at least so far, is not an indication that learning is taking place.
READ MORE:
