http://www.nationalreview.com/node/432925/print Both Trump and the Totalitarian Left Are a Threat to Civilized Politics
By Charles Krauthammer — March 17, 2016
By international and historical standards, political violence is exceedingly rare in the United States. The last serious outburst was 1968 with its bloody Democratic-convention riots. By that standard, 2016 is, as yet, tame. It may not remain so.
The political thuggery that shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago last week may just be a harbinger. It would be nice, therefore, if we could think straight about cause and effect.
The immediate conventional wisdom was to blame the disturbance on the “toxic climate” created by Trump. Nonsense. This was an act of deliberate sabotage created by a totalitarian Left that specializes in the intimidation and silencing of political opponents.
Its pedigree goes back to early-20th-century Fascism and Communism. Its more recent incarnation has been developed on college campuses, where for years leftists have been taunting, disrupting, and ultimately shutting down and shutting out conservative speakers of every stripe — long before Donald Trump.
The Chicago shutdown was a planned attack on free speech and free assembly. Hence the exultant chant of the protesters upon the announcement of the rally’s cancellation: “We stopped Trump.” It had all of the spontaneity of a beer-hall putsch.
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