The dangerous new direction of the Left

ANTI-Trump activists are now untethered from civilised norms, following demented denial about losing the 2016 election. Don’t assume Australia is immune from this sickness, writes Miranda Devine.

WE should recognise demented mobs possessed by self-righteousness because they were more or less a permanent feature of the Howard and Abbott governments when our borders were being secured and unauthorised boat arrivals being stopped.

Refugee activists whipped themselves into a froth of hatred against politicians they pretended were worse than Nazis, presiding over “gulags” and “concentration camps”. High on their own virtue, they excused any deception, abuse and even violence because they claimed to do it in the name of good.

In the United States the Left has hit a new low over immigration policy, now chasing Trump administration officials out of restaurants and booing them out of movie theatres, camping outside their homes and shouting through the night so they can’t sleep, ambushing their families and threatening their children.

At a refugee rally in Los Angeles on Saturday, Democrat politician and Clinton ally Maxine Waters incited the mob to harass Trump administration officials and drive them out of public places.

“If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” she urged the crowd through a megaphone.

Coming less than a year after a Republican congressman, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Democratic supporter, you would think Waters would choose her words more carefully.

But, no, in the last few days we’ve seen White House Press spokesman Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and her family evicted from a Red Hen restaurant by an owner who hates Donald Trump. Florida’s Republican Attorney-General Pam Bondi was harassed by chanting left-wing activists when she tried to see a movie. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was booed out of a Mexican restaurant near the White House and Trump adviser Stephen Miller was harassed by protesters at another Mexican restaurant and called a “fascist”.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked by the owner of a US restaurant to leave because of her job. (Pic: Nicholas Kamm)

Meanwhile actor Peter Fonda called for the kidnapping of the President’s 12-year-old son: “We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles.”

The latest unhinging was sparked, as always, by media propaganda about Trump’s clampdown on the Mexican border and the longstanding practice of separating some immigrant children from parents who crossed illegally into the United States.

Forget that child separation occurred in the Obama years with barely a peep from the outrage merchants. Forget that Melania Trump made a point of visiting the border to show her concern — cue outrage at her choice of clothing. Forget that Trump last Wednesday signed an executive order finally to end the separation of families at the border.

Time magazine ran an enormously effective and grossly dishonest cover showing a bawling Honduran toddler photoshopped in front of a seemingly sociopathically unmoved Trump. The story claimed the tiny girl had been carried away screaming from her mother by US border agents. But it was fake news. The girl’s father confirmed she was never separated from her mother.

The magazine apologised but it was too late. Emotions were running hot and anything now could be justified.

The cover of Time showing a crying child, who was later confirmed to have not been separated from her mother, and Donald Trump. (Pic: Eric Baradat)

Once you unleash the mob from civilised norms, there’s no telling what comes next. Now there is talk of round the clock security for high-profile Trump officials and suggestions they should arm themselves for protection.

Sure enough, last week, a Florida man was arrested after he allegedly threatened to kill Republican politician Brian Mast and his three young children: “If you are going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids.”

This is the dangerous new trajectory of the anti-Trump “Resistance” in the United States.

It is the culmination of two years of demented denial from the left, denial that they lost the 2016 election fair and square and, worse, that they lost it to a vulgarian vandal who is systematically dismantling all their works and merrily installing a generation of conservative judges who will change the country long after Trump is gone. The Left is apoplectic in its dawning impotence, and dangerous.

But don’t think Australia is immune from this sickness, since our left-wing establishment slavishly follows American trends.

On Monday, for instance, Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane was on the ABC defending the harassment of Sarah Huckabee-Sanders: “It’s powerful stuff. I can understand why the [Red Hen] restaurant owner took a stand and why there would have been many people cheering her on.”

Soutphommasane hopes the restaurant staff will keep up their activism, “agitate and organise [and] harness any righteous anger. Coming out of this exchange I would hope there are people who are galvanised”.

He did say it would have been better if the Red Hen owner had engaged in “an argument, a civil argument” with Sanders as she tried to order her meal.

But Bridie Jabour, assistant news editor at Guardian Australia, prefers harassment.

“The powerful stance, the shunning, that’s the thing that’s made international headlines,” she said. “That’s a big stance: ‘I’m not going to welcome you or your people or your kind or people who are working for you into my establishment’…. It’s taking a stand. It’s galvanising the left … In these times it is an effective tactic.”

That’s what it’s about, then. International headlines, taking a “stance”, shunning a certain “kind of people”. “Galvanising the left”. For what exactly?

As Trump tweeted yesterday at Waters, be careful what you wish for.