Earlier, I wrote about adversity, societal evolution, and the personal characteristics that allow capable people to weather any storm, no matter its nature.
Now, I'd like to discuss the upcoming year, and what nature of challenges that year may bring, in the form of political violence -- and for the benefit of anyone who has been living on a remote tropical island for the last year, one need look no further than the nearest Ivy League campus to see political violence taking place right now.
A good summary may be found in The American Mind, where Brooke L. Rollins, President and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, has penned an interesting piece on political violence in America - but a few things are missing from her excellent analysis. She states:
The leftist tumult, often sliding into intimidation and violence, overtaking American college campuses is neither temporary nor topical. That is, it won’t end when the war in Gaza ends, nor is it even particularly about that war. What we are seeing in 2024 is the latest, dreary iteration of left-wing violence that seems predictably to strike during election years.
Americans who remember the violence of 2020 will find it all familiar. Then, as now, there was a proximate trigger in events, and then, as now, the actual strategic aim of the so-called protestors—really insurrectionists—was to sow chaos and, not at all coincidentally, compel particular policy and electoral outcomes.
Congratulations, incidentally, for calling out what these acts actually are - acts of insurrection, and actual insurrection, not acts of hooliganism wherein a few dozen people wandered through the Capitol taking selfies. These students and their fellow travelers have occupied public property, broken into and taken over campus buildings, and physically attacked bystanders.
See Related: Pro-Hamas Mob Shows True Colors, Rips Head Scarf Off Jewish Man Near Met Gala, Then Beats Him
But the worst is yet to come, both in Brooke L. Rollins' estimation and my own. She continued:
The ideological violence of 2024 has yet to climax. One reason it is slow to build is that its proximate trigger is less sympathetic than the one in 2020: everyone wants equal rights for black Americans, but the local constituency for Hamas is quite a bit smaller. Another reason is that it’s early yet. Though the Gaza war has been underway for eight months, the American mass protests over it, in the form of territorial “occupations” and transportation shutdowns, are only a month or so old. Give them time to grow.
Grow they will, but for a reason not mentioned in Ms. Rollins' writing: The people we have seen protesting, rioting, and taking over property and public spaces are just the leading edge; they are the useful idiots who will be swept away when things get really serious. We have already seen evidence of the people pulling the strings.
See Related: Completely Non-Organic Pro-Hamas Protests Aren't Just Funded - They Train Protesters for Campus Chaos
The useful idiots are being used. They are being used by people behind the scenes, many of whom very likely entered the country through the Biden administration's porous borders. Millions have come in, unscreened, unvetted, many wholly unknown, to go... where? To do... what? Over the next few months, we may well find out.
There will be inflection points. The Democratic National Convention, ironically, may well be a major one, with the possibility that it will make the 1968 Democratic National Convention look like a picnic; this is a great irony, as the leftist agitators currently serving as unwitting cannon fodder never had a better friend than the doddering old man in the White House or his feckless, incompetent administration. The Republican National Convention may be another, but most of the first line of agitators will be more inclined to put pressure on the Democrats, some of whom share their radical views. But the real turning point will come this November.
In this fall's presidential election, as of this writing, things aren't looking goodfor the Democrats. Even if someone offers to bell the cat and convince befuddled old Joe Biden - and his First Lady - to step down, the Democrats have few good options. Who would replace Joe? The heir apparent, a cackling nitwit? The impeccably coiffed governor of California, who managed to destroy first San Francisco and then the entire state of California with his enlightened, progressive (as in, progress along the road to socialism) policies? Legal issues aside, the Trump reelection effort should be feeling pretty good right about now, and if the former President does Grover Cleveland himself into a non-consecutive second term, watch for our major cities to explode; the summer of 2020 may well be repeated, scaled up.
That, in my estimation, is when the actors behind the scenes will make themselves known, and the scale of the resulting conflict is anyone's guess.
The politicians on the left, amazingly, would have us believe that white supremacy is the threat the nation faces and that right-wing violence will somehow arise, somewhere, somehow. But the only violence that has been undertaken by anyone on the right has been in response, sometimes in self-defense, sometimes in defense of others, and sometimes in the defense of property or just plain public order.
The inestimable Colonel Jeff Cooper, in an interview, made a statement that rings ever more true with each passing day.
One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that 'violence begets violence.' I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure - and in some cases I have - that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.
It may well come to that. We can hope that it won't. But betting against violence, historically, has never been a winning proposition. Violence and war have been far more common, throughout human history, than peace and prosperity. As George Santayana said, only the dead have seen the end of war.
Civic violence or outright civil war are fundamentally incompatible with a free republic. The next year may well determine the nation's path forward for much of the rest of this century. We may need the characteristics I wrote about earlier - respect, fortitude, strength, and honor - to see us through.
I sure hope I'm wrong about all this. I have grandchildren, and I want them to have a peaceful, prosperous nation to grow up in. I don't want my grandsons to have to fight in another major war, as my father and grandfather had to do. I want to live out what remains of my life in peace, with no such worries.
But while it takes two to agree to peace, it only takes one to start a fight. The challenge then becomes, who will be the last man standing? I'd prefer it to be America.