Yesterday was a really bad day for the Left in America. At The American Spectator, I called it Repudiation Day. They had to watch as a man they called Hitler was inaugurated and proceeded to give a speech ripping them for the four years of abuse and persecution they unleashed on him and those who supported him.
Then Donald Trump uncorked a torrent of executive orders and presidential directives which represent, as I wrote, the greatest one-day about-face in the history of American governmental policy.
Frankly, the reaction was a little more muted than I’d expect.
The Left in this country knows they’re beaten. At least for now. And as the Trump train leaves the station and thunders down the tracks toward that Golden Age he proclaimed yesterday, their despair is likely to manifest itself in all kinds of ways.
We saw one of those here in Baton Rouge. At the Louisiana governor’s mansion, Jeff Landry followed through on his pledge to fly a MAGA flag on the flagpole aside the building. That was a bit of triumphalism not wholly unexpected given Landry’s fairly close ties with the president.
But doing so was sure to generate whining. And the fish caught in Landry’s MAGA net included these throwbacks…
Baton Rouge NAACP President Jarret Luter said the flag is partisan and does not represent all Louisianans. The local chapter wrote a letter to the governor asking him to reconsider the move as it will be flying on not only Inauguration Day but on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the letter it states, “The decision to raise a partisan symbol on this day undermines the spirit of inclusion and respect that Dr. King dedicated his life to advancing.” A small group of the chapter gathered outside the governor’s mansion to look at the flag and show their displeasure. “If you voted for Donald Trump or not, this is the people’s house, so you should have the general goodwill of all of the citizens of Louisiana,” Luter said.
Even funnier than that was the NAACP’s “protest” outside the governor’s mansion yesterday – which contained three people.
Trump got more than 60 percent of the vote in Louisiana in November. It’s hard to say the MAGA flag isn’t representative of the state’s voters. It’s certainly more representative than, say, attempting to cancel a fancy steakhouse for enforcing a dress code, or honoring drug dealers and murderers with President’s Awards like the NAACP has recently done.
Or going to court to demand an affirmative-action congressional seat for a crooked black Democrat politician like Cleo Fields, which Landry was kind enough to accede to. Fields is so representative of the people of Louisiana that he couldn’t even vote for the Laken Riley Act, which probably has close to 80 percent support in the state.
What’s fun about this new era that began with the election in November and officially kicked off yesterday is that we don’t have to give a single fig about what the NAACP says anymore. We can call them out for what they are – a bunch of Marxist buffoons who exist solely to intimidate weak white politicians into giving in to extortionist demands.
It’s not that the NAACP – or the Left in general – must be constantly repudiated, though that isn’t a terrible idea. It’s that they should never be granted an audience for their complaints without being made to offer something in consideration.
You don’t want Landry to fly a MAGA flag at the governor’s mansion? Fine. What are you bringing to the table? Give us something we want in return for Landry relenting on that flag.
But don’t you dare pretend to hold some sort of claim to moral power. You haven’t had anything of the sort in half a century. Jim Crow is gone, you aren’t relevant anymore, the word is you’re funded – or at least your Baton Rouge chapter is – by dope dealers and every single one of your demands makes the lives of ordinary Americans worse.
You’re a special interest group. And not a particularly meritorious one. You’re owed nothing. And when all you can summon is three people to protest over a flag at the governor’s mansion, you’ve officially become a joke.
The MAGA flag might not even have been all that good an idea. Landry issued an executive order last year which specified that the flags to be flown on state buildings were limited to the U.S. flag, the POW-MIA flag and the Louisiana flag, which gave rise to complaints that the MAGA flag violated his own executive order. He gets around that by saying the governor’s mansion isn’t a state building per se, and therefore it’s not the same thing.
That’s one of these cases where the explanation is messy and makes the whole exercise questionable. Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
But on the other hand, triggering the Left is becoming its own currency. It’s a way to show these people that they’re out of power and that nobody cares about their feelings after the damage they’ve done. Seen in that light, sure – fly the MAGA flag and see how many of them lose their minds over it.
When we can start making real policy that improves the lives of our people at the expense of the feelings of the NAACP or the Louisiana Bucket Brigade or whatever other neo-communist special interest group which can’t stop complaining about prosperity and progress, then we’ll really be making this place great again. Let’s see what Landry and the Louisiana legislature can do when the regular session starts this spring.