Friday, March 11, 2016

Guest Post: Trump Protesters


Peter Sage:  
People old enough to have been politically aware in the 1960s remember how successfully Richard Nixon and George Wallace used the countercultural youth rebellions in politics and lifestyle to solidify electoral majorities.  The backlash and counter-revolution was much bigger than the youthful rebellion.  My post of earlier this evening elicited this commentary by Thad Guyer.  Thad is an attorney specializing in representation of whistleblowing employees, so he pays close attention to messages that are persuasive to judges and juries.  Like my post, the events of this evening in Chicago (an unruly protest, the police recommendation that the political speech be cancelled, and Trump's use of the disturbance to position himself as the champion for the American rights of free speech and assembly plus public safety through  strength.

Thad supplied the photos to use in his commentary, including the vision of a Time Magazine of the near future.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:   Trump Protesters May Become the New "Hard Hats"

I agree with UpClose that nothing could help Trump more at this point than to have protesters intentionally disrupting his rallies. Fueled by a new flavor-of-the-day mainstream media story about Trump rallies featuring sporadic violence that could one day become mass violence, the protesters made it happen one news cycle later. They knew they could perform for the press with rough-ups on the venue floors and in the bleachers. Self-fulfilling anti-Trump media prophecy, as it were. The essence of the protesters is to silence speech, not promote it.  

The Trump protesters tonight are one step away from being the rebirth of the "hard hats" in 1969-70, a group who came to disrupt the speech of a mass anti-establishment movement. Like Trump or hate him, Time Magazine got it right that his is a movement seeking to overthrow what it views as an oppressive power structure. The protester chaos tonight in Chicago was just short of the required violence level needed to be like the hard hat rioters. "The Hard Hat Riot of 1970", as Wikipedia describes it, happened in New York City as hundreds of establishment construction workers attacked Vietnam protesters wanting to overturn the political and governmental order. Indeed, the hard hats had been organized by the New York State AFL-CIO, aptly enough at the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot.


Obama and Hillary are now powerful visible icons of a political establishment founded in a new global order. Hillary overtly seeks a third Obama term, with its signature Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, pro-immigration policies, and anti-police Black Lives Matter racial mantras. Trump and his supporters are a White nativist pro-police movement intent on upending that globalist establishment. The "protesters", a dignified label they will lose at a particular lawlessness threshold, seek to stop Trump from speaking, and deliberately obstruct the speech and association rights of his supporters. The protesters are on the verge of becoming the new hard hats, people who are alarmed and afraid they cannot prevail at the ballot box. And the tactics they are using will likely doom them at exactly that spot-- the ballot box  

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