I have seen the future. I saw it earlier this evening.

I saw it while watching Donald Trump give a press conference full of his usual bluster about the Chinese and the Mexicans and his exploits in real estate. None of that was important, and then…

That was Trump, threatening violence against #BlackLivesMatter if they send the same sort of unhinged, obnoxious radical women complete with the purple dreadlocks and black t-shirts, to the stage in an effort to disrupt one of his events the same way they’ve done to the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix and a Bernie Sanders speech at a Social Security rally in Seattle.

Which provoked the reaction you could expect on Twitter from the #BlackLivesMatter goons…

#Trump wants to put the #BlackLivesMatter protestors to the test. They will show him what time it is. Believe that.

— Ekemini Uwan (@sista_theology) August 12, 2015

Thus, my vision.

They will send “protestors” to the stage at Trump events in an effort to disrupt him, and his security people will brutalize them each time. He will taunt them for their failure. And the disaffected middle class, mostly white but not all, will love him for it.

And if one of the purple-dreadlocked harpies from #BlackLivesMatter actually make it to the stage, Trump will carry through his pledge to fight them. Trump will hit one of these women before his security people drag them away.

And that will be the end of the election. There will be no stopping Trump on the way to the White House after he decks a lunatic from #BlackLivesMatter.

Am I joking about this? I am 50.1 percent joking about this.

I am 49.9 percent serious about this because as I have written, #BlackLivesMatter is the largest political liability to arise in modern American political history. We just haven’t had a direct test of it, though the GOP’s swamping of the Democrats in last fall’s elections with #BlackLivesMatter’s performance in the Ferguson riots – which for some unfathomable reason is being allowed to reprise itself this week without the police roaring in to crush the rioting – was still fresh, and that was a taste of what is coming.

These people are doing what they can to reprise 1968. They are actively fomenting violence and unrest in the streets of America’s cities – it’s frankly a huge surprise to see relative quiet since the Baltimore riots though the violent crime in most American cities (and not a small amount of it seems to involve a racial component) has been on a major spike.

Today it appears that Freddie Gray, whose death of a broken neck in a police van unleashed the Baltimore riots, had a history of attempting to injure himself in police custody as a means of producing a lawsuit. Which would make Gray, as a cause celebre for the #BlackLivesMatter crowd, just as laughably unsuitable as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Mike Brown, a violent thug high on illegal drugs who, a mere few minutes after brutalizing a store owner for a box of cigars, fought police officer Darren Wilson for his gun and then attempted to charge Wilson just before he was shot.

And so the #BlackLivesMatter agitation is most prominently based on lies. Freddie Gray and Mike Brown were the proximate causes of their own deaths. And while all of America joins in wincing at the necessity of tough policing in bad neighborhoods, the entire narrative of #BlackLivesMatter – that there are killer cops executing innocent black victims across America and creating an atmosphere of terror in black neighborhoods – is fraudulent.

The country at large knows it and is disgusted by it. The country at large sees the prominence of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in the demonstrations surrounding #BlackLivesMatter and seethes.

But while these people should be excommunicated from American politics for fomenting unrest based on lies, the Democrat Party cannot afford to do its duty and send them to the shadows. The Democrat Party is so beholden to identity politics and its electoral math is so dependent on maximizing both vote share and turnout in the black community, that it cannot deliver the rebuke to these people they so richly deserve. The Democrats have spent eight years creating #BlackLivesMatter; the cost to undo them is more than they can bear.

Already Hillary Clinton is attempting to craft a separate peace with them so as to avoid their disruption of her campaign events – most of which are carefully-staged small gatherings with Democrat operatives rather than actual campaign rallies or speaking events. Sanders, who actually speaks to crowds and is emerging as an honest-to-God competitor for Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire as he draws 25,000 or more in Oregon and Los Angeles, is at their mercy.

None of which will make these people go away. As they grow in prominence and get louder, we descend into 1968. And in 1968 the radicals stormed the Democrat convention amid cities burning across the country. The public chose the candidate as far removed from that chaos as it could.

Should the parallel continue with 1968, whoever gets the Republican nomination will win. The New Left radicals who brought chaos to the Democrat convention in Chicago that year boasted the allegiance of a far larger segment of the population than do the #BlackLivesMatter lunatics now, but the latter will generate an outsized media focus and consequently an outsized blacklash. And with the Democrats in a trick box of their own making, it is merely a question of who the Republicans nominate.

And if Trump is seen as the toughest Republican against the worst of the Left’s thugs and nuts, which couldn’t be made any more clear if he’s the one who physically fights one of them on camera, the disaffected base voters who consider him a fun distraction now and the low-information bread-and-circuses voters who came out of the woodwork for Obama in 2008 could very well carry him to victory. Think of all the states with open primaries where John McCain rode to the GOP nomination despite being despised by a sizable chunk of the party’s activists and voters. The Republican establishment is even more discredited today than it was that year, and Trump’s earned media from doing battle with #BlackLivesMatter would rob the oxygen from the large number of serious, high-quality conservative candidates currently in the race.

This isn’t a cheerful prediction. A Trump presidency would offer an American version of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, with similar results. It would finish off the Republican Party and make conservatism a discredited philosophy. America would become a political idiocracy in which political leaders are chosen from a roster of ego-driven celebrities who best mug for cameras and drive TV ratings of cable networks, and our worldwide position of leadership would be lost – probably for all time.

We need a serious leader with the sand to tackle fundamental problems and drag us back from the abyss. Trump is not that man. But there are forces out there threatening to turn our coming election into a chaotic farce and it’s Trump, more than any other candidate, who can harness those forces to leverage the worst impulses of our electorate to victory.