RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jim Talent was the Republican Senator from Missouri (2002-2007) He lost the next election to Democrat Claire McCaskill. He is a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Andy McCarthy has written an estimable column outlining the legal aspects of federal “domestic terrorism” laws. One of Andy’s points is that acts of violence in the context of protests are overwhelmingly state rather than federal crimes; another is that state officials’ response to the violence so far has been largely rhetorical. What’s worse, for the most part, is that the rhetoric has merely made use of the violence to make political points.

He’s right. I’ll go further and say that words, no matter how strong, are no longer enough, if they ever were, to stop this growing trend. What is needed is action, both legislative and executive, from state authorities.

I wrote about this several months ago in the context of violence on campus. Now the problem is spreading to city parks and neighborhoods. What needs to happen, broadly, is this:

First, state laws must single out violence and disorderly conduct in the context of mass expression for special and certain punishment, and the punishment must be meaningful to the kind of people who do this sort of thing. That means jail time. If existing laws are not strong enough to do the job, state legislatures should make them stronger, and everyone should know that the laws have been strengthened.

The problem has grown so great that nothing less than incarceration will be sufficient to stop it. The message must be that if you are involved in a protest and you break the law, you will go to jail, and not just overnight. You will cool your heels in the county jail for a minimum of a month or two until you learn to respect the rights of other people.

That principle must apply to any kind of violence or disorder. Even crimes that in other contexts would appear minor, such as blocking access to a street or building, must result in real jail time. The whole point is to nip unlawful conduct in the bud before it blossoms into violence against people or destruction of property.

It doesn’t matter where the offenders are on the political spectrum or what they are protesting. It’s not up to them to decide whether their ends justify violent or criminal means. It’s up to the rest of us, through the responsible public officials, to insist they keep their conduct lawful and peaceful.

Second, the laws must be strictly enforced. This is where governors must be strong leaders.

Too many mayors have been lenient for fear that they will suffer political consequences if they enforce the law against members of politically favored groups. Given what I’ve seen from our current crop of mayors, I don’t expect that to change.

Governors represent a larger constituency, the vast majority of which is weary of people who deliberately stir up violence and disorder. Further, cities are political subdivisions of the states; states are ultimately responsible for how the cities are governed, and as far as I know, all the state constitutions give their governors full authority to preserve civil order when local officials won’t.

So governors must thoroughly prepare their responses before the crises come and must act decisively when the crises happen. I wrote about the steps that should be taken in the context of violence on campus, but the same principles apply here:

[Governors] should make it a personal priority to: ensure that state law enforcement personnel are properly trained and equipped; prepare a bipartisan list of competent and fair special prosecutors who can be swiftly appointed should the need arise; establish close connections with their college administrators and local authorities; and — when they see trouble brewing at one of their universities — publicly warn that speech will be protected and violence will be punished.

I’ll add only that states should spend whatever is necessary to make sure they have large numbers of well-trained and -equipped personnel ready, whether from the state police or their National Guards.

One advantage of this approach is that it will identify and neutralize the loose bands of anarchists and other troublemakers who are roving around the country causing this violence. McCarthy is right that we should be concerned, from a constitutional standpoint, about excessive federal involvement in monitoring or infiltrating these groups. But that isn’t necessary. Once state authorities arrest and incarcerate these individuals, their names, faces, and fingerprints will be on the books, and subsequent violations can and should be punished more harshly, including with felony imprisonment when warranted.

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers.

During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez’s unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt.

Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic.

Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan.

Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media.

Google has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering.

Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing.

Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each.

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a “racist.”

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans “Nazis” — because some of them support the duly elected Republican president — Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

They’re all “fascists”! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are “anti-fascists,” or as they call themselves, “antifa.”

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last weekend were “Nazis,” “white supremacists” or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they weren’t allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europe’s migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the “Unite the Right” crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

That’s when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled “terrorism,” but we still don’t know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, we’ll unravel Fields’ motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was “upset about black people” and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a “White Power” poster and “liked” three organizations deemed “white separatist hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.