It was not long after Election Day that we asked the question here on LN: Why are Trump supporters not rioting? Believing with all your heart and mind that the most powerful position in the world was stolen from a man who was heroic in your eyes is bound to incite the deepest of passions.
And the proverbial dam of pent-up frustration and outrage finally burst on a day like no other in the nation’s capital. It likely did not take any exhortation by the president for the rioters to go wild - they were, undoubtedly, already well-informed about the massive vote dumps in the middle of the night, hundreds of sworn allegations of electoral malfeasance, the ocean of mail-in ballots with questionable provenance, voting system irregularities and all the rest. This was the final indignity after years of being portrayed by elite media as rubes and racists.
Different Standards
Trump and his followers writ large who eschewed violence for weeks on end after November 3 will undoubtedly be condemned for a genuine insurrection - defined as a violent uprising against an authority or government. But it is instructive, and even more so revealing, to compare the reaction among Republicans and conservatives after this shocking turn of events to that of Democrats and the left during the endless weeks of insurrection over the summer in hot spots from New York to Minneapolis to Portland and many cities in between.
Nary a word was spoken by the left in condemnation of the out-of-control riots. No solutions were offered. There was not even any acknowledgment of the neighborhoods burned down, lives ruined, and livelihoods destroyed. Police became targets, and were told to stand down and prepare to be defunded. The rest of us were told to sit down and shut up, that the behavior of Antifa and BLM savages was justified because a cop had killed a guy without cause in Minneapolis. Democrats stood by, watched, and said nothing because they didn’t have to - the elite media was all-in on the blackout and their candidate, pathetic as he was, had a lead in the polls thanks to the pandemic. Besides, if the rioters actually voted, it would hardly be for Donald Trump, so why make them angry?
In the sharpest possible contrast to that behavior, Republicans and conservatives universally condemned the rioters in the U.S. Capitol. In fact, they did so almost ad nauseam, with one commentator after another lining up to get in their two cents about how awful it all was. It’s been virtue-signaling on a massive scale, to be sure, but revealing of how foreign such violence is to conservatives.
What's In Store For 2021?
While Trump voters are likely fed up with stultified lectures from the likes of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, frontrunners now ready to throw Trump overboard and move on, they have come face to face with the three-headed monster that is the sad and unforgiving reality of American politics: The left can do almost anything - from rioting to vote tampering - and get away with it under the protection of the media wing of the Democratic Party. The right, with a few notable exceptions, will do little more than pay lip service to the cause of America First, unless, as in 2016, it puts them into power and keeps them there. And a true outsider like Trump with no allegiance to the Swamp may take the establishment by surprise one time, but can not survive.
How Trumpists - and Trump himself - process these hard truths will determine the future of the MAGA movement, and will constitute perhaps the most compelling story of 2021.
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