FEAR THE ALL-POWERFUL LEFT!

The fever dreams of the propaganda-addled crazies at the Heritage Foundation are hilarious:

Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation....

“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project.

Everyone knows these guys are nuts -- but what about serious, sober-sided Bret Stephens of the New York Times opinion section? Surely he wouldn't entertain any scenarios as nutty as these!

Actually, he would:

Imagine the following scenario: Trump is in the White House and decides to make good on his signature promise of mass deportation of migrants. Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.

That’s the incendiary America we are likely to get again in a second Trump term, whether the match is lit by deportations, another incident of police brutality or something else. The right-wing fantasy of somehow shutting down the left won’t be met quietly.

Right-wingers really believe we take direct action at the drop of a hat, and are always ready to riot. It's as if even the brainier right-wingers have a Fox News B-roll clip of a Black Bloc knucklehead smashing the windows of a police car on auto-repeat in their heads.

Here's a partial list of things over the past decade that didn't lead to left-wing riots, or even to significant left-liberal protests:

* The blockade of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court appointment.
* Donald Trump's election (the protests didn't happen until the inauguration)
* Family separation
* Trump's response to Charlottesville
* The "Stop the Steal" campaign and January 6
* The Dobbs decision
* The banning of abortion in multiple states
* The busing of migrants to blue cities
* The revelations of profound corruption and ideological extremism at the Supreme Court
* Attacks on drag shows
* Attacks on librarians
* Attacks on trans care

And the list goes on. Even other high-profile police brutality incidents haven't sparked widespread demonstrations, much less riots. Apart from the war in Gaza, nothing has inspired a great deal of protest.

I wish Americans would take to the streets the way, say, Israelis have to protest Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to neuter Israel's Supreme Court, or to protest his self-serving indifference to the plight of the hostages. U.S. unrest in 2020 was an anomaly.

Would we really put our bodies on the line for migrants? Remember, only a few of us tried to block evictions in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I didn't. Did you?

The Stephens column is headlined "Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term." He also predicts Republican regret because he expects Democrats to do well downballot, which will lead to divided government (no tax cuts! no right-wing ideologues on the federal bench!) and lots of "executive actions of dubious legality." Actually, Democrats probably can't win more than 50 Senate seats, given the certainty of a GOP pickup in West Virginia, and that combined with a GOP vice president would give Republicans control of the Senate, which means every judicial pick will be rubber-stamped. But we can't expect New York Times op-ed columnists to understand the basic rules of American government, can we?

What Stephens argues is that Trump will be bad because Democrats and angry liberals/leftists will be empowered. So we're the problem, really. And it's all because we're so tirelessly activist at a grassroots level and make it so difficult for Republicans to govern when we have even the slightest amount of power in Washington. I don't believe this, but I really want to live in the fantasyland where it's true.