Understanding the anger that fueled the Washington protests By Dennis Byrne
Why did thousands and thousands of people go to Washington yesterday to protest? If you’ve wondered why so many fellow Americans did, then you should read this. Even if you didn’t wonder, this is a must read.
I know a couple of people who went. I don’t presume to speak for them, but I can tell you what I see and hear, They were angry, but they didn’t go to Washington to invade the Capitol. Unlike those who did, they love this Republic and they understand that an assault on the seat of government betrays the very principles of the Republic itself.
To ignore their anger because of the violent assault on the Capitol only adds to that anger. Anger that has been growing for years, cultivated by decades of being ignored and ridiculed. They feel surrounded by a hostile government, dishonest media and corporate bias.
I know that some of you will stop reading here because you’ve heard this all before. But you’ve heard it all before because that’s the truth.
There’s a lot of talk about the “root causes” of poverty and racism, but virtually none about the root causes of the protestors’ anger. The anger was fueled by being called “deplorable,” people who are irrationally devoted to their faith and consumed by their love of weapons. Insult piled upon insult, as if only the stupid, ignorant, uncaring, self-centered and hateful could believe what they believe.
But those were just insults. The realty goes further. Their jobs disappeared into the international ether. Thank you to a corporate America that feels as distant as the the place their jobs went. Take the media, an industry in which my former colleagues are blind to their own uncaring prejudice that denies so many a fair shake. It’s not something the protestors imagine.
There are the Lord High Eminences who control the largest slice of social media. They want to have the protections of phone companies who are not legally responsible for the hatred that flows through their lines, but who at the same time demand to be legally exempted from the damage done by the same trash found in their spheres. Oh, that’s right, I forgot that they’re removing the trash by selectively censuring the voices on the right but not the left.
There are the academic elites and race baiters who make a very nice living thank you by providing “evidence” that America is systemically racist and Americans (meaning the deplorables) must repent, repent, repent. And to attribute any disagreement about public policy to the deplorables’ hidden racism. Just as racism prompts the protestors to be told to wait in the back of the line because of the color of their skin. That their skin color means that they must assuredly are privileged.
The coronavirus lockdowns served to mightily inflame that anger. The jobs of working men and women disappeared thanks to the economic restrictions imposed by tinpot governors and mayors. These tyrants flagrantly ignored the science by cruelly slamming the schoolhouse door on children, causing grievous emotional damage and permanent life-time harm. For the first time in the history of the United States, millions of people were ordered to cower in their homes. Or threatened with arrest for walking outside, even on a lakefront path.
Was the election stolen from them? That’s a factual question that requires comprehensive investigation and, if so, remedies. But the protestors can’t be blamed if they smell a rat, because rats there were. Enough rats to cancel a presidential election and through the country in even further unimaginable chaos? I think not.
The problem was that their concerns we left to be carried away in the wind. Just one example: With state legislatures assigned by the U.S. Constitution to
set the rules for elections, how was it that unelected executive branch officials and judges were allowed to change those rule? It seems that those cases challenging the legality of those changes were tossed, not on their substantive merits but because of a dubious procedural technicality. It’s no wonder that so many voters felt disenfranchised.
Their justifiable cries for legal and properly conducted elections were waved away by the naive who blindly followed the assigned wisdom that “there is no election fraud.” How ironic, because these same people accuse their opponents of voter “suppression.”
Special anger arose from the small business people who for years have been challenged, if not crushed, by a tsunami of regulations concocted by an army of hidden and unaccountable bureaucrats who think they know better about, well, everything. They had a whiff of the freedom that led to financial success with the relaxation of those straight jackets, but because of an iffy election, they fear that success will get sucked away unfairly. Well, screw them because a distant ecological threat inspired by politically corrupted science is more important than their very survival.
Colleges give voice to the most outrageous and radical left-wing speech by providing “safe spaces,” creating restrictive speech codes banning the slightest of “micro aggressions”. The climate on campus after campus is stifling, yet, the deplorables’ legitimate public policy positions are shameful and deserve to be mocked. No safe spaces for them.
I suppose I could go on. Point’s made. And Donald Trump heard it. Whether he listened for altruistic reasons or because it fed his ego by getting him elected president, is beside the point. Who else was listening?
Trump has discredited himself now and even for some of his ardent supporters it was a bridge too far. Trump mistakenly thought that only by building a cult of personality could he succeed. Trump might have finished off his political career (it is hoped here), but the reasons that promoted the protestors to exercise their constitution right assemble to petition to government for redress of their grievances remain as important as ever.
Plenty of people are qualified to be the new standard bearer in the 2022 elections to recover the ground lost by Trump’s ravings. Let it be so.
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