Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down
President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of
Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive
politics.
On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a
different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first
women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.
Instead of milling around Washington, organizers
have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in
The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are
calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant,
not peaceful.
The document
was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, pictured above, a convicted terrorist.
Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two
terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping
for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to
become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS:
Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted,
in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods. However, she won the right to
a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD
at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she
worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator.
You can see why she’s a hero to the left. Another co-author, Angela Davis,
is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is
best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were
used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She
celebrated by going to Cuba.
A third
co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International
Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US
State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are
back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right
people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating
Canada.
The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a
grass-roots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information
about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the
country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near
them.
According to The Guardian piece, women should spend
their day “blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care
and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also every woman is
supposed to wear red in solidarity.
The bristling tone of the manifesto and its call
for a “militant” uprising are yet another indicator that liberals are
increasingly willing to justify violence in the name of opposing Trump. After
the Berkeley campus erupted in flames and violence to protest the planned
appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos, many progressive activists took to Twitter to
cheer them on. Hollywood stars Debra Messing and Sarah Silverman both tweeted
their support, with Messing saying, “RESISTANCE WORKS” and Silverman ranting:
“WAKE UP & JOIN THE RESISTANCE. ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET
OVERTHROWN. MAD KING & HIS HANDLERS GO BYE BYE.”
Progs are equally enthusiastic about the idea that
it’s OK to punch people as long as you hate them: “Stranger Things” star David
Harbour said at the Screen Actors Guild awards, “We will, as per Chief Jim
Hopper [the character he played on the show], punch some people in the face
when they seek to destroy the weak and the disenfranchised and the
marginalized.” Nice liberal Democrats should be aware that this newer, angrier
cohort is just as hostile to their own party. “I have problems with the
Democratic Party that is just as linked to the corporate capitalist structure
as the Republican party,” Davis said at a rally last year.
Anti-Trump activism seems to have little to do with
the political arts required to win elections — finding common ground, forging
alliances, making friends. Instead all of these demonstrations are about
denouncing enemies, and making yourself feel better about the November defeat
by gathering publicly with those who share your rage. This sort of thinking
leads to such self-defeating acts as interrupting traffic in places like New
York City (where Trump got 18 percent of the vote) or San Francisco (9
percent).
If you want to persuade working-class Trump voters
in Wisconsin to join your cause, annoying rich liberal Democrats trying to get
to work a thousand miles away is a strange way to go about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment