The Democrats Hold the Nation Hostage

The Democrats Hold the Nation Hostage
A Black Lives Matter protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Ore., on July 25, 2020. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)
Josh Hammer
9/4/2020
Updated:
9/6/2020
Commentary

As America’s cities literally burn to ashes and violent crime spikes to its highest level in decades, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and their media apologists have coalesced around their talking point. “This is happening in Donald Trump’s America,” they bellow in unison from the command posts of high society.

Let’s be blunt: This is an offensively stupid talking point. The rubes and yokels in flyover America—the river valley dwellers that the bicoastal elites love to hate—may lack the hoity-toity social norms befitting SoHo or Haight-Ashbury, but they have their own pair of eyes intact. And they can see just as well as anyone else that the current scourge of anarchic savagery tearing asunder urban and suburban America seems to be the exclusive phenomena of leftist, Democratic Party-controlled jurisdictions.

They can see just as well as anyone else that the feckless leaders in charge of these jurisdictions often ruinously defy federal assistance, opting for the sort of banal “Orange Man Bad!” taunting better suited for echo-chamber Twitter plaudits than the type of selfless statesmanship required by a proper politics. And they can see just as well as anyone else that nary a single prominent elected Democratic official has unequivocally and forcefully condemned the insurrectionist Antifa-Black Lives Matter coalition seeking to burn down the republic in one great act of civilizational arson.

They can see that these are, as Matthew Peterson of the Claremont Institute recently put, the Democratic Party’s riots.

But Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris, and the Democrats are not content with merely gaslighting the American people into questioning whether they can believe their own lying eyes. They are not content with merely abetting—sometimes tacitly and sometimes actively—the calamitous, murderous ruination of large swaths of America’s urban corridors.

Rather, through the constant drumbeating of their farcical “this is happening in Trump’s America” talking point, the Democrats—the puppet masters of our present anarchy—are offering a quid pro quo to the American people: This violence is happening because Trump is president, so vote for us and we will stop the violence. The unstated but remarkably clear implication is that the looting, rioting, and violence will go on if Trump is reelected. If Trump is reelected, the puppet masters will permit the Antifa and BLM puppets to continue their free rein, driving a riven nation ever closer to a lethal abyss.

This is a hostage situation. The Democrats are taking the American people hostage, holding a proverbial gun to their heads and issuing a thinly veiled threat to vote for them to make the bloodletting stop—or else the carnage will continue apace.

This is extraordinarily immoral behavior completely unbecoming of a major political party. Alas, it is hardly the first time that leading Democrats have taken the nation hostage and threatened bloodshed if they do not get their way. Fort Sumter comes to mind.

The Democrats may think they can fool the American people, hoodwinking them into believing that those woebegone denizens mugging bystanders and vandalizing storefronts are MAGA hat-clad neofascists. But the Democrats are wrong. The American people are simply not that gullible, not that easily misled, and not that easily duped. They know that the violence is happening in decades-long progressive bastions such as Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. They know that leading national Democrats, such as Biden and Harris, have utterly failed to condemn the Antifa-BLM wellspring of the present barbarism. They know that these same Democrats could call off their street-thug jackals if they wanted to do so—and that their failure to call them off belies their desire to see the mayhem continue.

The stakes this November are very, very high. The election is a referendum on many things. It is a referendum on whether America is a systemically racist and irredeemably flawed nation. It is a referendum on the goodness and justness of the American idea. And now we can add one more to the mix: It is a referendum on whether American voters are as offensively stupid as Democrats seem to believe they are.

Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training, is an opinion editor for Newsweek, a podcast contributor with BlazeTV, of counsel at First Liberty Institute, and a syndicated columnist.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author. As a nonpartisan public charity, The Epoch Times does not endorse these statements and takes no position on political candidates.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Josh Hammer is opinion editor of Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators, and a contributing editor for Anchoring Truths. A frequent pundit and essayist on political, legal, and cultural issues, Hammer is a constitutional attorney by training. He hosts “The Josh Hammer Show,” a Newsweek podcast, and co-hosts the Edmund Burke Foundation's “NatCon Squad” podcast. Hammer is a college campus speaker through Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America's Foundation, as well as a law school campus speaker through the Federalist Society. Prior to Newsweek and The Daily Wire, where he was an editor, Hammer worked at a large law firm and clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Hammer has also served as a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute and a fellow with the James Wilson Institute. Hammer graduated from Duke University, where he majored in economics, and from the University of Chicago Law School. He lives in Florida, but remains an active member of the State Bar of Texas.
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