President Donald Trump is successfully waging a counterrevolution against leftwing institutions using the bully pulpit and his rightful political authority.
The academic Left thinks this amounts to war.
That was the take by a series of academics in a lengthy article by New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall. In his piece titled, “Trump Is Not Afraid of Civil War. Neither Is Stephen Miller,” Edsall argued that in the past weeks following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump has “initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate, and defund the opposition.”
Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, wrote that Trump’s “attacks on his political opponents are purely authoritarian” and that “he sees the killing of Kirk as an opportunity to accomplish what he has been talking about since he entered politics: using the power of the state to punish those who defy him.”
Enos compared the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination to the Reichstag fire—since the modern academy apparently can’t dredge up negative historical references outside of Nazism and slavery—in which the Third Reich used the pretext of the burning of the Reichstag by a communist to go after communists.
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote for the piece, “taking advantage of a violent event to advance the oppression of a disliked group is a classic technique of aspiring autocrats.”
“Tell us about it,” say the countless Americans demonized, deplatformed, debanked or dumped into the D.C. prison dungeons after J6.
Mason added that some “leaders are uniquely capable of calming violent attitudes in the public,” but that this administration has done the opposite.
I can’t seem recall too many left-leaning academics saying the same after former President Joe Biden stood in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, awash in ominous red lighting, and blasted “MAGA Republicans”—basically anyone to the right of Liz Cheney these days—as a “threat to democracy.”
The other comments from other political scientists in the piece mainly focused around how unfair it was that Trump connected the leftwing alleged shooter of Kirk to the broader Left. They lament how awful it is that various leftwing institutions are being defunded, and Trump is sending in the National Guard to Democrat-led states that have refused to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents under siege by leftist agitators.
Edsall also wrote, apparently to buttress the argument that Trump is unleashing “weaponry” against the Left, that the Department of Energy is canceling “321 energy project awards totaling $7.5 billion” mostly intended to go to Democrat states and districts. Of course, almost all of these contracts are for various “green” projects that Trump and Republicans have been against for decades.
Apparently not handing a blank check to Democrat causes and using force to uphold federal laws are examples of dictatorship according to Edsall and his email list of academic, totally not partisan, experts.
Since I think this piece represents a large amount of “elite” opinion on the Left it deserves a broader response.
First, if the assassination of Kirk was just an outlier incident widely and sincerely condemned by the Left then it would be unfair to tie the Kirk shooting to their political movement.
But that’s not the case at all. Twice, an assassin tried to kill Trump on the campaign trail. There have been several other assassination attempts by deranged leftists too, some of which have ended up with extremely lenient punishments given the severity of their crime.
And even that could possibly be set aside if countless people on the Left—whether hordes of white-collar professionals on TikTok, or talking heads in the media, or politicians in office—didn’t act like absolute ghouls in the wake of Kirk’s slaying.
It’s hard to take the Left seriously about political violence when not a single member of the Virginia Democratic Party has called for attorney general candidate Jay Jones to back out of the race despite saying over text that he wanted a political opponent and his children to be murdered.
The academics who contributed to the New York Times piece didn’t have much to say about assassination culture or the violence being perpetrated and celebrated by the Left. I guess we are just supposed to ignore that.
Second, it’s rich that these academics are suddenly worried about a presidential administration using undue power and enacting retribution on political enemies.
Apparently, our Ivory Tower Rip Van Winkels missed the last four years in which the Biden administration relentlessly went after Trump to put the former president and his allies in jail, silence his backers, and scare Americans who voted for him. Actually, they didn’t just use their power against Trump and his supporters, but all kinds of Americans who opposed the Left’s agenda.
The previous administration used every political and institutional lever they could to target their domestic enemies. They used the pretext of what happened on Jan. 6 to hunt people down across the country. If you want a comparison to the Reichstag fire, that seems like a pretty good one, right?
The academics suddenly sounding the alarm about civil war and tyranny were notably silent about authoritarianism in that era.
The truth is that the Trump administration has been good at going after the institutional Left, but in ways it’s very much entitled to do.
The Trump administration is well within its right to reduce and reform the administrative state, which has been eating out the substance of the American people far longer and more destructively than King George III.
The Department of War is justified in suspending or releasing personnel who celebrate the murder of people who vote differently than they do. How can they be trusted to defend the nation, the whole nation, when duty calls?
Higher education, the modern temple of the institutional Left, isn’t owed endless amounts of taxpayer money, especially given their illegal and persistent discrimination against categories of Americans.
The fact is that the institutional Left is justly losing influence in America after acting completely unhinged during the Great Awokening. They’ve lost support from the American people and now must contend with a presidential administration that is willing to drain their power at the source.
It’s a political revolution of a type that we’ve experienced several times in our history.
The only people threatening civil war are Democrats and those on the Left who can’t accept that they no longer wholly control the federal policy and the direction of American culture.
Related posts:
- Lawmaker Calls for Research Into ‘Toxic’ Trump Derangement Syndrome
- Speaker Calls Out Rep. Ilhan Omar for ‘Playing Into This Characterization of Charlie Kirk That the Left Has Been Advancing’
- The Crudity of the Obsessive-Compulsive Left