By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, September 25, 2020
About that peaceful transfer of power . . .
I do not have access to my friend Mario
Loyola’s Donald J. Trump super-secret decoder ring, but I am inclined to
accept Loyola’s explanation that what President Trump was trying to say, but
couldn’t quite manage to say, was the usual witless Trump trolling — “I will
win if we have a fair election without millions of fraudulent mail-in ballots,”
Loyola translates — delivered in a slightly more illiterate than usual version
of the president’s signature disco-ball-made-of-squirrels style, somewhere
between “All mimsy were the borogoves!”
and “Ah, but the strawberries, that’s, that’s where I had them, they laughed at
me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, with geometric
logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist!”
Just another Wednesday on Planet Trump.
Trump’s statement was two kinds of dumb: regular dumb and
politically dumb. Regular dumb in that it was the kind of confused logorrhea
that really should have been interrupted by Samuel L. Jackson demanding “English, m———-r: do you speak it?”
Politically dumb in that it forces Trump’s apologists to promise to be
peaceful, to make a very firm and solemn vow to be peaceful, to buy a
first-class ticket on the good ol’ peace train — at the very moment when
Democratic mobs in Democratic cities were burning everything they can get their
hands on, shooting police officers and other people, rioting and promising more
riots, egged on by elected Democrats who promise to gut the Constitution in the
pursuit of partisan political advantage. Even Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, the
most useless corncob in American political life, is starting to think it’s a
bit much.
Ah, but Republicans, of all people, must affirm their
peaceable intent. Anybody remember a bunch of guys in short-sleeved white
button-down shirts and ties from Jos A. Banks raising hell in Provo when Mitt
Romney lost? Of course you don’t — it didn’t happen. The only time National
Review subscribers have ever been close to rioting was when the ship’s bar
temporarily ran out of Glenmorangie on one particularly thirsty post-election
cruise.
Republicans are always right on the edge of political
violence, or so we are told — by people who refuse to acknowledge that
Democrats have gone over that edge. Democrats can shoot, loot, and burn all
day, and it’s a “mostly peaceful protest.” During the 2000 Florida recount,
some Republicans did the very un-Republican thing of staging a protest — not a
“mostly peaceful” protest but an actual, honest-to-goodness peaceful one. What
did the Democrats call it? “The Brooks Brothers riot.”
(Which will be the name of my next band.)
The people on the left who believe that Donald Trump is
plotting to make himself president-for-life are the progressive answer to
QAnon. They’re bananas, they’re terrified, and they are having a terrific
time. Clive Thompson, writing
in Wired, argues that QAnon is a kind of alternate-reality game, one
that “poses a mystery that feels so big it can only be solved by crowdsourcing.
It’s thrilling to be involved with other people in something bigger than
yourself. Plus, it turns one’s armchair-warrior Googling into a heroic quest
for truth.”
It is difficult to believe that very many of the
Froot-Loops in the Q world actually believe what they say they believe — but,
on the other hand, this is America, and America is full of lunatics: Some of
those flat-earth guys are just running a grift, but
some of them really believe it. The Trump Forever Junta conspiracy theory
tends to be trafficked in by slightly fancier people, and so it smells just a
little bit more respectable, but it’s basically the same thing — a narrative
that is attractive not because it is plausible to believers but because it
offers a ritualistic way to lower the social status of the people they hate.
We have seen this before, of course. The last time
around, every Democrat with a public platform in North America demanded that Trump
et al. promise to “accept the results” of the election — and then they promptly
rejected the results themselves when the wonky psychotic ping-pong ball of
American democracy didn’t bounce their way. Now, they want Republicans to
promise a peaceful transition of power — even as they turn the election season
into a season of blood and fire.
What evidence do
we have that the Democrats will abide peaceably if they lose? Portland?
Seattle? St. Louis? Washington? “Never concede”? Why are we talking about peace
and order in November rather than peace and order right here and right now?
You can have the
riots, or you can have the sanctimony — you can’t have both.
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