Last night in Chicago, a mob of progressives shut down a Donald Trump rally.
The protestors — described as mostly young millennials — infiltrated the University of Illinois Pavilion, in central Chicago, and set about subverting the event. They waved Mexican flags — pro-immigrant, geddit — and wore t-shirts calling Trump Hitler. There were violent clashes and a policeman was reportedly injured.
The protestors cheered when police announced the rally would be shut down because of security concerns. They revelled in their victory against free speech, taunting the furious Trump fans with chants of ‘we won’.
This is American politics now: juvenile, anti-liberal, menacing.
We know that Trump voters are angry. Even angrier, it seems, are those on America’s left who just cannot accept that Trump voters exist.
Weirdly, both sides want Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination. The Trump fans, obviously, because they love annoying the world with their candidate. But so too the anti-Trumpists, because they violently want to have a moral political purpose.
No wonder Donald Trump says he ‘gladly accepts the mantle of anger’. He must see that anger on all sides fuels his rise.
As lots of conservatives on social media have already said, just imagine if a bunch of violent Trump fans had disrupted a Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton event. They would be called fascists, and the condemnation would be global. Politicians across the world would issue statements expressing concern.
When the same thing happens to a Trump rally, however, the reaction is strangely mute. This unfairness causes resentment which causes Trump to win more votes.
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