RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the machinery of politics, all cycles are spin cycles. And once the centrifugal force takes hold, the whirlwind will not easily come to an abrupt halt. So it is not surprising that after the most contentious presidential election in recent history, a lot of disgruntled Americans can still be seen spinning out of control.

The protests – some of them morphing into riots – were not unexpected. They have become a popular activity enjoined by mostly younger people who some suspect may not even have voted. Yet the irony of this is as lost on them as is their carrying placards saying “Love Trumps Hate” while they shout obscenities and make mischief.

In the past, protests and marches were staged with the expectation of achieving some kind of tangible result. Workers went on strike and picketed for higher wages and better working conditions. The disenfranchised marched for the freedom to vote. Protests and the like took place in order to right unconstitutional wrongs.

But the 2016 post-election protests haven’t a prayer of changing anything. As one wag put it, you cannot question American democracy. Trump won this election fair and square. Nobody in authority contends otherwise. Yet despite the fact that both Obama and Clinton have urged a peaceful transition, the devastated liberal mob heeds only the call of the wild.

These are the whiners who sorely suffer from what I call “Post-Trumpmatic Stress Disorder,” a self-induced disease that is void of physical manifestations other than those that spring like evil dreams from hyperventilating imaginations: coat hangers becoming the only obstetrical tool available in back-alley abortion abattoirs, same-sex unions dissolved; sick Americans, deprived of health insurance, untreated and dying on our streets; polluted air and water killing off the rest of us; hordes of hardworking immigrants hustled across the border, never to return.

Perhaps the protesters are too young and politically naïve to understand that election outcomes in America are the result of our democratic process. Trump is not a banana republic dictator foisted on the people. He cannot be driven into exile by a chorus of shouted insults. Nevertheless, protests, per se, have become courts of first resort for many young people, even if participation in them leads to nothing more than national press attention and a party atmosphere with the like-minded. Their generation, after all, has been encouraged by role models to protest wherever and whenever possible, in the belief that unified venting, in itself, is a noble end.

Early on in their pampered lives, modern protesters learned the nature of parental indulgence. Their temper tantrums were endured, and even rewarded if thrown in public. Their progressive parents, harboring angst of their own, found it convenient to avoid disciplining their offspring lest it breed resentment. So if Junior felt in any way thwarted, he vigorously protested until some placating action or reward shut him up. Distraught parents learned quickly that the humiliation of a child’s meltdown could be eased by a piece of chocolate melting in his mouth. They wanted their way and made trouble if they didn’t get it!

Twenty or whatever years later, these disgruntled whiners are still up to their old tricks, even if there are no treats. As long as they can have their expensive smartphone on hand when they high-mindedly trot off to a protest, they can brave anything. And since they can expect little to change as a result of their action, they find satisfaction in thinking of themselves as a concerned part of history. Besides, isn’t there safety in numbers? Well, at least until the shouting turns to shooting

Tens of thousands of people around the country took to the streets Saturday to protest the election of Donald Trump, the fourth straight day of demonstrations against the Republican president-elect.

In New York, an estimated 25,000 people covered a 20-block stretch of Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower, the 58-story skyscraper fortified by the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service agents.
Two people were arrested, both for trying to hop over a police barricade, a senior police official said. The charges against the two people weren’t immediately clear.

Demonstrators have converged on Trump Tower daily since Mr. Trump was elected Tuesday.

Saturday’s protest was the largest to date but also orderly, compared with earlier protests, the police official said. On Wednesday, police arrested 65 people, almost all for not following orders to stay out of the street.

In Los Angeles, about 8,000 people swarmed into the city’s downtown in one of the largest anti-Trump gatherings on the West Coast.

Throngs of people—including many families and children—filled Wilshire Boulevard, a major city thoroughfare, for a slow planned march downtown. The protesters held signs with slogans that have become familiar in the past few days: “Not My President” and “Reject Hate.”

Some demonstrators wore safety pins—a gesture that has become a global symbol to the marginalized that they are “safe” with the person wearing the pin.

Unlike past nights in L.A. when protesters blocked freeways and dozens were arrested, the afternoon protest was peaceful. Los Angeles Police said they made no arrests as of early evening, and most protesters had gone home, though some said they planned to continue the march.

I admire Ed Cline and agree with everything he writes, but the word “Kristallnacht” evokes Nazis and genocide…the ultimate expression of racism. The idiots of the post election rioters -and I saw them very close up on Friday night- are disappointed pseudo rebels without real cause. They are thugs but they are not like the Nazis……rsk
Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would the anti-Trump rioters have behaved any differently?No.

Instead of protesting Trump’s election, they’d be celebrating Hillary’s victory with the same appetite for destruction and brutality and carnage. They would be celebrating it in the best Nazi tradition, such as the Night of the Broken Glass., or Kristallnacht in the character of Novemberpogrome. Businesses would be targeted for destruction and looting (see the glass being broken by hooded thugs) and physical attacks on Trump supporters would be common, and ignored by a compliant news media. The Nazis were celebrating the ascendency of the Nazis in German political life. The “Social Justice Warriors” could just as well be celebrating Clinton’s ascendancy to the White House.

“What difference would it make?”

The pretext for the attacks in 1938 was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. The attacks were planned and carried out by the Nazi Party to target Jews, the whipping boy blamed for Germany’s economic and other problems. They were targeted, Saul Alinsky style – long before he wrote Rules for Radicals – and isolated and persecuted.

The pretext – and the etymological root of the term pretext, means that the demonstrators then and now were and are acting out a prepared script – is pretending to be “outraged” and “disgruntled” and in violent opposition to Donald Trump’s winning the 2016 presidential election. When multiple mass rallies abruptly occur in multiple cities across the country, from coast to coast, and even in Britain (as Kristallnacht occurred in Germany in 1938) it means that these are no more “spontaneous,” for example, than the Muslim riots and demonstrations against the Mohammad image cartoons. These are all pre-arranged and planned for maximum effect and shock value, to scare the powers that be into concessions.

Some of the rioters are now claiming they are practicing their First Amendment rights. But freedom of speech does not include rioting and terrorizing individua