Sedition, Insurrection, and the Democrats’ Desperate Strategy

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked in the past a lot about the unfortunate turn to the hard Left that Democrats have made. But in the last week, it’s become surreal.

We had this minor official—a Democratic official—Sade Perkins, and she posted that she was almost happy that we lost over a hundred people, the majority of them children, in this flash flood in Texas. She said they were “all white,” and therefore, they were discriminatory. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And then, people weighed in. And they had some atrocious comments. A pediatrician was almost gloating. And they had a variety of mechanisms to show how grotesque and ghoulish they were.

One group of people said, “It was global warming. You people in Texas”—where, by the way, there’s more, I think, there’s more wind turbines and solar than almost anywhere—”you people denied global warming. This was caused by global warming. And therefore, you got your just desserts.”

It was not caused by global warming. It was a once-in-a-century flash flood of a magnitude no one had seen in a hundred years.

And then there were other people who said, “You supported the Department of Government Efficiency cuts, so you got what you deserved.” And in her case, she said, “You’re white people.”

So, it’s very, very, very disturbing.

At the same time, we’ve had now two organized assassination attempts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are just following the law. Remember what they’re doing. Apparently, in the mind of the Left, it was a moral thing to break the law and let 12 million people—without vaccinations, without audits, without criminal background checks—come into the United States. But it is an amoral thing to enforce the law and restore the rule of law, and ask people, who came in illegally, to please return.

But in that conundrum, we’ve had now 10 people arrested. And they were kind of Antifa types. I’m not saying they were Antifa. But they were dressed in black. They had radios. They had semi-automatic weapons. They had body armor. They were young, mostly white kids that looked like they were children of the middle class. And they shot an ICE agent in the neck. And they had a gun battle. And then, this was following an earlier assassination attempt.

Now, you think that the Democratic Party would be worried. But we’ve got even more disturbing reports that Democratic Congress people said, “Well, what are we supposed to do? We meet with our constituents and they’re telling us that one of us should be shot. I don’t mean shot by punishment. They’re urging us to use violence and be willing to be shot by others to promote a radical agenda.”

And I don’t know if that’s true because they won’t report any circumstances that would substantiate that. But basically, the congressional Democrats are saying, “I don’t know what I can do. These people are pushing us to the radical edge.”

And then you saw House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, didn’t you? He was posing with a bat like he was going to club people, in opposition to the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

I could go on with all of these examples. But I mean, this is an age in which people tried to kill President Donald Trump twice. And we know what happened to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other congressional personnel. And so, we’re getting a Luigi Mangione, etc. The attacks on Jewish people in Washington, D.C. We’re getting to the point now, the Left is entering the era of sedition, insurrection.

We had Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass go to a park and confront ICE agents who were federal law enforcement people, obeying and enforcing, and trying to restore the legitimacy of federal law, which surpasses municipal and state law, remember? And she said, “You’ve got to get out of my city.”

This is insurrection. Why is it happening? We’ve said in the past that part of it is that the Democratic agenda nobody wanted, there were 80/20, 70/30 issues, and as a result of that, they lost the Congress, they lost the White House, they lost, of course, in most cases, the Supreme Court.

So, they don’t have any power. So, they’re frustrated. But I think, even more importantly, in the first administration, Donald Trump addressed symptoms of the progressive project: Let’s restore deterrence. Let’s try to deal with the border. Let’s try to stop crime. Let’s cut taxes. But he didn’t have time or the knowledge or the constituencies. And he was working with a hostile Congress to address the root causes of those symptoms.

This time he’s saying, “This lunacy, it’s caused by certain institutions: foundations, universities, the Democratic Party, public broadcasting, the media.” And so, what he’s doing is he’s going after blue-stocking, left-wing law firms. He’s going after the endowment and taxing university endowments. He’s looking at grants on federal—grant surcharges gouging the federal government on university grants. He’s dealing with countries that are openly promoting open borders.

So, he’s dealing with the symptoms. And the Left is saying, “Oh my gosh, we have no institutional power. And now the way that we exercise power without having legislative or executive influence is institutions, foundations, media, K-12, universities. And Donald Trump is starting to address our left-wing monopoly and dominance of those institutions. And if he were to be successful, we would collapse, dissipate, disintegrate. So, we’re going to go take to the streets and we’re going to use violence and we’re going to do anything possible to stop this Donald Trump counterrevolution.”

It’s going to be very dangerous times. We’ve got to be very careful about what everybody says and not escalate the situation. But it’s mostly, now, coming from a frustrated and impotent Left.

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