Following the Riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Richard Nixon said: “A divided Democratic Party cannot unite a divided country.”
Presidential historian on MSNBC Michael Beschloss quoted a variation on Nixon’s remarks in arguing that the protests causing Donald Trump to cancel at speech at the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion showed that the disorder was sure to hurt Donald Trump in next week’s GOP primaries.
Beschloss merely showed his liberal Democratic blinders.
The difference is that the Democratic Party self-destructed at Chicago in 1868, while the despicable Trumpites were partly shut down by the free speechophobic left at Chicago in 2016, and will only grow stronger.
Whether or not Trump planned it that way, the media circus will probably push him over the line to victory in Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. Commentators on the left will no doubt soon begin comparing Chicago 2016 to 1933’s Reichstag Fire after which Marinus van der Lubbe, an unemployed immigrant Dutch bricklayer, was tried and sentenced to death. The Nazi very successfully portrayed the Fire as a communist plot, while the left for generations portrayed van der Lubbe as a working-class martyr. In fact, he was guilty as hell, though the idea was his own.
In 1886 in Chicago, the Haymarket Affair occurred when a peaceful protest against the killing of demonstrators for an 8-hour day by the police ended in the planting of an anarchist bomb killing eight police and four civilians. In the ensuing trial, seven of eight anarchists were sentenced to death; the eighth to life in prison. The result was another long-lasting liberal-left cause célèbre claiming that the bomb was a put-up-job by anti-union conspirators.
Only recently has new research by historian Timothy Messer-Kruse shown that the defendants were part of “an international terrorist network.”
Donald Trump probably knew that—by scheduling his rally on a Chicago campus rather than in the white suburbs—he was asking for trouble. A protest was inevitable: if it was peaceful and contained, he would get credit for another big rally; if it erupted in violence or was cancelled, he also would win. Black Lives Matter, MoveOn.org, the amnesty crowd, and assorted anarchists and Trotskyites were his willing accomplices.
Unfortunately, decent Americans of all national origins, races, and religions will reap the whirlwind.
