The column I wrote this week for The American Spectator is about Sam Liccardo, the execrable mayor of San Jose whose incompetence (along with that of his La Raza-connected police chief) in providing security for the Donald Trump rally there a week or so ago was compounded by his decision to blame the Republican presidential candidate for his supporters’ own victimization in the rioting that followed, and also about the enablers of those riots in the leftist media like Elliott Remsin of Vox, who was suspended for advising people to riot wherever Trump should give a speech.

You would think these people, given their known connections and affiliations, would make it a point of personal emphasis to insure that Trump’s rally came off without a hitch. After all, Liccardo is as slavish a Hillary Clinton supporter as there is, and publicly so. (Talk about a lack of emphasis on law and order, right?) Instead, what you get is the attitude that because they don’t like Trump it’s really not such a big deal if people do get brutalized.

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Here’s a bit of advice for Remsin, and Liccardo for that matter: watch out what you wish for. You might find a few takers to bust up a rally here and there, but the vitriol and anger you think you’re entitled to is nothing compared to what you’re stoking in the people your paid thugs are brutalizing at those rallies. And if you keep it up, while deluding yourself that your rent-a-riots are justified, those people are going to respond.

And when they do, it won’t just be San Jose that looks like Weimar Germany. It’ll be the whole country. And it’ll be your fault.

Our readers are well aware that I am no fan of the way Trump does business on the campaign trail; we don’t need to get into that subject again.

What is a lot worse than Trump and the things he says and does is this mentality on the Left that they’re entitled to decide who gets to practice violence and who doesn’t. There is a fairly broad bit of perspective on that side of the aisle to the effect that grievances and animosities of left-wing constituency groups are actionable through a Ferguson or Baltimore, but nobody else’s are.

And that, I’m here to tell you, ain’t gonna fly for long.

You keep having a San Jose, a Costa Mesa, a Tucson or an Albuquerque every time Trump holds a rally and it won’t be long before Trump’s people start bringing weapons and dealing violence right back at the paid thugs and rioters the Left is throwing at them with the encouragement of irresponsible scumbags like Remsin, or this Jesse Benn character I discussed in the column who wrote a long defense of political violence as a response to Trump.

There will be dead bodies on American streets. On both sides.

As I said in the column, the pamperered crybullies on the Left who think they’re justified in destroying property and beating people up in the name of Social Justice have absolutely no idea what they’re getting into. Those are not the people with the guns, and they’re not the people with military training, and they don’t represent the large swath of the American people they think they do.

And the anger they have stoked on the Right is greater than anything they can imagine.

The Left seems to want to comfort itself by thinking this is just a bunch of racist white guys who don’t matter anymore. They’re wrong about that, just as they’re wrong about most everything they convince themselves of.

We’ve discussed this before, but two things are happening. First, the social-justice movement which has fermented its way out of agitating for civil rights for people who were being legitimately denied them and into drumming up synthetic outrage on behalf of antisocial behaviors, and trashing American history, tradition and what used to be entirely uncontroversial and universal values along the way, has stirred up an animus among the people Nixon referred to as the “silent majority” which is more intense than it was in the 1960’s; the difference is the current cast of traditional Americans has more fully bought into the idea that nonviolence is a civic responsibility, whereas back in the 1960’s there was a little bit less reluctance to have a fist or a bat do the talking.

When traditional Americans begin taking enough lessons from the Left that violence is an acceptable outlet for political anger, you’ll begin to see that the old “silent majority” was the fat and happy crowd compared to what we have now.

And the reason for this is the second thing that’s happening. Namely, that the white working-class, from which so much of the old “silent majority” came from and so much of the Trump support comes from now, is actually becoming an aggrieved minority. When you go 15 years with declining median income, when on net all new jobs created since 2000 have gone to immigrants, when life expectancy is actually dropping among the white population, when drug and alcohol addictions combine with rising out-of-wedlock childbirth, thus leading to the same kinds of family breakdowns and social pathologies in poor white neighborhoods that you see in poor minority neighborhoods and when you see the kind of hopelessness set in among whites that so debilitates, for example, the black community, then you will see the rise of the same kinds of tribal politics and radical breaks from civil society that you’ve seen among the Left’s constituencies.

Put it together, and it’s a powderkeg. And given that the seven years of the Obama administration have been spent actively promoting the division and economic stagnation/decline which is driving the anger – and, not to put too fine a point on it, but creating Trump as a political phenomenon in the first place, this is all the responsibility of the Left.

So when we turn into Weimar Germany, and our streets are the scenes of bloodbaths between groups of aggrieved and checked-out radicals, we’ll know who to blame. And Trump, for all his manifest faults, is not the primary suspect.

 

– Then again, who’s to say it’ll be Trump? He can’t keep having weeks like the one he just had, where he careens from fighting with his surrogates and campaign staff over his demonization of the judge in the Trump U case as a “Mexican” before meekly walking it back, getting called out for saying that he watched Paris Hilton’s sex tape with his wife and that Hilton was hot when she was 12, having video surface of him saying he hates the phrase “American exceptionalism,” losing endorsements from key Republican figures, battling Newt Gingrich in the media, having an army of his contractors and suppliers claim to have been screwed out of payment, and on and on.

Erick Erickson says Trump has two weeks to right the ship and give the Republicans some confidence they haven’t bought a pig in a poke with him, or else the delegate revolt which has been quietly bandied about might actually happen…

More Republican governors, senators, and representatives are starting to fear disaster in November with Trump as the nominee. The chances for loss of the Senate is growing. Trump trying to convince Republican donors that he does not need a massive data operation while being convinced he can win California and Maryland has made senior Republicans and major donors very queasy. That Trump has hired a pollster to try to win New York is another signal to donors that Trump is a terrible investment living in delusion.

These next two weeks are going to be critical for Trump, who must show he can be unscripted, hold his own in interviews, and not blow himself up. If he cannot do it, behind the scenes wheels are already beginning to turn to yank the nomination from him and the party elders from Romney to the Bushes will take discreet and decisive action.

Trump has no more latitude. The leaks to Bloomberg of his conference call with surrogates ended that. He now must put up or shut up.

Erickson says Scott Walker is a pretty good bet to be the candidate who parachutes in if Trump were to implode, and Walker might well be a possible savior. He obviously would have to learn from the atrocious campaign rollout and the mistakes he made in the people he hired, and he’ll need to find a way to address the concerns Trump capitalized on within the party in order to bring Trump’s hard-core people aboard, but Walker is the candidate who can activate the Koch Brothers’ donor network to ramp up a fundraising operation quickly; that money will be on the sidelines with Trump as the nominee.

Walker also comes off as sane and honest. You could beat the crook on the Democrat side with a Scott Walker, and you could also expect to see someone who would begin going through the federal government with a fine-toothed comb and getting rid of some Democrat sacred cows in the bureaucratic structure.

The question is whether you can win by running on that. Walker didn’t get anywhere with it when he was in the race, largely because his messaging stunk.

But Trump needs to improve as a candidate if he’s going to placate the party. That’s clear.

 

– If you want to know how far gone the Democrat Party really is, just watch this…

Madness. Just madness.

And by the way, if you want the best summation of the two parties and the failure of their establishments, read this piece by David French – who is not, after all, going to run for president.

– Y’know, Gary Johnson is also running, and he’s catching as much as a dozen percent at this point. He’s even getting space on CNN’s website to promote his message.

– How about a big Bronx cheer for Mitch McConnell and the titans of principle among the Senate Republicans who passed a National Defense Authorization Act which includes a provision requiring girls to register for Selective Service.

The provision comes courtesy of John McCain, who’s as terrible as ever.

In 10 years, when your daughter comes home from Syria, or Iraq, or Venezuela or Lithuania, in a body bag through Dover Air Force Base you’ll know who to thank.

McConnell and some of these other superstars have attempted to placate the people by stating that we don’t do a draft anymore anyway, and that the military is an all-volunteer force, so this isn’t a substantive change. Well, if that was true then you eliminate Selective Service altogether, because it’s a needless government program if we’re not going to have the draft.

But that would require fighting, and this they will not do. So instead, they give in to the nuts on the Left who would put your daughter in a foxhole out of the insane conceit that there is no difference between men and women.

The anger that produced Trump? You want to know where it comes from? This is where.

– Finally, Today’s Last thing. It’s not Halloween yet, but it doesn’t matter – we have a porcupine gleefully chomping on pumpkins…