THE RIOTS AND “THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE:”
Right now, the “we” is the left (books, the press, the education system, the Democratic Party), and the force that’s been called forth is the Antifa BLM mob. Elected politicians such as a mayor like Ted Wheeler of Portland or Jenny Durkan of Seattle have already glimpsed the army of broomsticks coming towards them to trample them. But this is no cartoon.
In Iran in 1979, the left played footsie with the Ayatollahs, thinking it could use them and that the left would win in the end. History tells us they were wrong. Right now in the US it’s left vs. left – the political, elected left (and the “useful idiot” liberals) versus the more anarchist/nihilist/sociopathic left such as Antifa. The first group is Mickey Mouse (in more ways than one) and the second group the broomsticks.
And the elected left may find that the spirits it has summoned cannot be banished.
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, “Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.”