Progessives' Permissiveness Towards Protesters to Blame for Violence
Last Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has prompted lawmakers from all corners to call for American unity and issue statements condemning the horrific act.
In the hours following the attack, US President Joe Biden affirmed on camera that "there's no place in America for this kind of violence."
For his part, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who in 2020 screeched from outside the Supreme Court that conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would "pay the price" for their judicial decisions, posted a statement that evening on the social media platform X confirming that "political violence has no place in our country."
The disciplined declarations of solidarity and heartfelt expressions of prayer articulated by President Biden and Senator Schumer have since been echoed by a steady stream of liberal lawmakers, who are similarly petitioning for a redirection in America’s political discourse.
Yet, along with scrutinizing the implications behind the use of contemptible rhetoric, it's worth examining how the evolution of left-wing protest movements and the permissive policies that fueled their rise has advanced a climate of chaos and helped foster a cultural narrative that has grown tolerant of the political violence unfolding across cities and campuses over the last several years.
In 2011, the anti-corporate groups and participants behind the Occupy Wall Street campaign symbolized a slice of the unrest leftist agitators would soon unleash in the U.S.
What began as a noble effort by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to permit organizers the freedom to gather in Zuccotti Park soon devolved into a months-long assembly within the privately owned plaza as activists set up encampments and ushered in an era of diminished public safety in the area.
Their actions were replicated years later, albeit through more menacing measures, by Antifa, whose network of militants unleashed a sustained campaign of pillaging and destruction in countless American communities.
Democratic officials in places like Portland, Oregon, first gave a pass to Antifa-aligned perpetrators, whose heinous acts included attacking federal officers and destroying property.
At the time, President Donald Trump intervened and announced his intent in 2020 to designate the group as a "terrorist organization" and deployed federal officers to crime-ridden communities in blue-state pockets such as Chicago and Albuquerque.
Yet evidence detailing the looting of small businesses and the indiscriminate killing of civilians was not enough to convince most liberals of the threat left-wing protests posed to Americans' safety, psyche, and spirit.
To date, the relationship linking protestors to the progressive politicians providing them cover consists of a partnership rooted in ideological convenience.
With left-leaning lawmakers refusing to acknowledge the moral depravity that seeped into these movements, the mobs evolved into formidable foes whose rising influence reflected the dismissiveness with which liberals characterized the protestors' affinity for engaging in political violence.
In 2020, this phenomenon proved the perfect framework under which the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement could leverage the intensifying tempo of an intersectional-driven agenda to curate a menacing grievance-based Marxist campaign of intimidation.
Abetted by the Democratic Party, the BLM movement successfully shifted societal currents to the point of mainstreaming its agenda within well-intentioned liberal spaces.
It bears mentioning that despite the financial wreckage and lawlessness that BLM left in its path, most Democrats and media outlets continued to embrace the movement as mostly "peaceful."
For many liberal policymakers, adopting the destructive motivations of the demonstrators was a price worth paying to establish a racialist paradigm under which the former President and his conservative supporters could come to inherit the mantle of dismantling Democracy.
The Democrats' tolerance of past protest movements explains how this year's terrorist-sympathizing activists were able to bring cities and schools to a historical standstill.
The tactics used by Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, and BLM were spun to curate a web of anti-American and antisemitic assemblies that took place following the October 7 slaughter of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists.
Over the last nine months, tens of thousands of protestors have poured into American communities to participate in the civil unrest, with Keffiyeh-clad provocateurs desecrating statues, burning the American flag, disrupting Christmas travel, and vandalizing property while calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
Even worse, scenes of blocked bridges and the academic capture of universities by radical ideologues rarely warrant a meaningful rebuke from Democratic officials.
Most recently, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris declared that the young activists protesting Israel are "showing exactly what the human emotion should be."
The decision of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to drop the charges against some of the pro-Hamas students who stormed Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, which left a frightened university employee barricaded inside an office along with a path of damage for maintenance crews to clean, is yet the latest example in a string of policy failures aimed at placating progressive protestors.
For nearly fifteen years, Democrats' palliative approach to addressing a politically motivated mob mentality granted radical agitators the latitude to flourish in scale and intensity.
What began in Zuccotti Park metastasized into over a decade of ruinous movements directed against our nation's foundational values, soon spreading into populated pockets within the American ecosystem.
If liberals are sincere about reducing divisions in our nation, they should start by reckoning their rhetoric with years of support for anti-American protest campaigns.
Irit Tratt is an independent writer residing in New York. She obtained her Master's in International Affairs with a focus on the Mideast from George Washington University. She has worked as a legislative assistant for several members of Congress. She maintains her advocacy work through her involvement with organizations such as The Tikvah Fund, The Republican Jewish Coalition, and The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). Irit is a steering committee member on the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). Ms. Tratt has been published in The Jerusalem Post, The American Spectator, The Algemeiner, JNS, and Israel Hayom. Read More of Irit Tratt's Reports — Here.
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