“Hate America” Rallies 

Yesterday was the day to proclaim your virtue, if you were so inclined. You would have been among prominent Democrat leaders from Bernie Sanders to AOC to Gavin Newsom and Chuck Schumer, all of whom evidently felt obliged to denounce the duly elected president of the United States.

Perhaps these leaders forget that Donald Trump won the presidential election against Kamala Harris. Here’s how it played out.

• Electoral College: 312 to 226. (Trump needed only 270 votes to prevail.)
• The popular vote: by about 2 million. As Roger Kimbal notes, a nice but unnecessary distinction.

Geezers + Zeers = GenZeers 

Roger Kimball resides in Connecticut (Fairfield County). Nearby is a deep shade of blue Westport, the home of clumps of “unattractive GenZeers—Geezers and Zeers—who regularly gather on a certain bridge to protest for or against whatever the central committee has handed down as this week’s issue: climate change, fossil fuels, Brett Kavanaugh, Israel, whateva …

Mr. Kimball recognizes some of the scolds. You know, he says: The voices of the unheard. One callous commentator observed, “Protests are meant to be the voices of the unheard. Yet these protests are the voices of those who never shut up.”

Ironies Abound 

The George Soros-funded theme was “No Kings.”

(Donald Trump), the democratically elected president, obeys (then appeals) every outrageous injunction issued by hubristic district court judges to stymie his agenda. But Trump is nonetheless excoriated by the media and professional leftists for acting in a tyrannical, king-like way (isn’t “regal” the word they’re searching for?).

President Trump recognizes and has fun with this absurdity:

“I was very concerned that a king was trying to take my place, but thanks to your tireless efforts, I am STILL YOUR PRESIDENT!” 

No King’s Day: The 4^th of July 

If Trump were really a king, observed one commentator, the government would be open now. Trump would simply decree it.

We already have a No Kings Day. Most Americans call it the 4^th of July.

What Democratic Process 

As Kimball notes, “democracy” is ever on the lips of these “No Kings” ditto-heads. Lockstep capitulation to various anti-democratic initiatives is what drives them.

When it became obvious that Joe Biden was incapable of continuing his presidential campaign last summer, the Dems simply parachuted in Kamala Harris as their candidate. She had won no delegates. She went through no democratic process. The party elders simply anointed her. Was that not very autocratic, even monarchical, behavior?

Below are items that helped secure his Trump’s 2^nd term:

(1) seal the Southern border

(2) remove the millions of illegal immigrants preying upon the country

(3) wage war upon the reign of woke ideology

(4) jump-start and Americanize the moribund economy

Nota bene: these are things Donald Trump campaigned on. Things trump was elected to do. This is what people voted for. And that is precisely what the “No Kings” mob is protesting.

Neo-Totalitarian 

Meanwhile, the No Kings robots acquiesced merrily along to Joe Biden’s deep-state agenda.

• Censorship? Check

• Covid Shutdown? Check

• Harassment/prosecution of one’s political enemy? Check

• Effort to Destroy Trump? Check

The “No Kings” Harpies were incensed when their King lost his crown, their court displaced, their walls tumbling down. Each embarrassing Greta Thunberg-like discharge, admits Kimbal, made him cringe and wonder how it is the left has a monopoly on this species of outrage.

Should conservatives attempt to jump on the sympathetic bandwagon the propaganda press accords to the Harpies? Hold on here, warns Kimball in the New Criterion.

“By disposition, conservatives are inclined to endorse precedent. But since the dominant culture is liberal, conservatives must make their peace with progressive policies or find themselves accused of abandoning the central conservative principle of supporting established precedent.”

This surreal situation was the result of an inexorable process of one-way ratcheting, offers Kimball. 

“Progressive ideology makes continuous inroads, gobbling up one institution and one consensus after the next. Any occasional pushback is weathered as a temporary squall, after which the work of expanding the progressive envelope proceeds apace. Last year’s extreme outlier becomes this year’s settled opinion. To oppose that is evidence not of conservative principle but of reactionary, even (as we have lately been told) insurrectionary, stubbornness.”

Tom Klingenstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute and a colleague of Roger Kimball’s, suggests that Trump-supporting conservatives should step out of their natural quietism to “wake up Republicans and get them, not to negotiate with the America-haters, but to propose solutions for crushing them.”

There is a good deal to be said for this argument, agrees Mr. Kimball, Thinking about the significance of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Klingenstein cautions, “Its lesson is not, as most Republicans think, that we need more civil debate; rather, that we need less of it. Kirk’s assassination affirms that civil discourse is only helpful up to a point. You cannot debate with people who want to criminalize debate or even kill you.”

Roger Kimball suggests that readers contemplate this: “Conservatives are not as adept at protesting as leftists.”

… as Klingenstein notes, for at least the next three and a half years, “we have a friendly administration in place and DEI is now playing defense. It is more vulnerable to attack than in the past.”

There will always be room for debate. But when the other side endeavors “by any means necessary” to censor, criminalize, and curtail debate, there is also room for action.