Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
The fragility of today’s angry, woke revolutionaries
ATikTok video that recently went viral showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said, “All lives matter.” In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics. She won a huge audience, as she intended.
But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn’t want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn’t like.
This wouldn’t have been much of a story. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — one that showed her weeping in a near-fetal position. She fought back tears while complaining how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it. What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting, the threats and the screaming in the faces of police is the schizophrenic behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.
On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their own careers on the internet pose as vicious Maoists — the hard-core shock troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs and spray paint.
In homage to Italy’s Blackshirts of the past, they wear black hoodies, don makeshift helmets and strap on ad hoc protective padding — part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.
The televised stereotype of the antifa activist is a physically unimpressive but violent-talking revolutionary. He seems to strut in laidback, blue-city Minneapolis but wisely avoids the suburbs and small towns of the nation’s red states. He spits at police when standing beside fellow agitators but would never do that when alone confronting an autoworker or welder.
When police march against the antifa crowd and their appendages in order to clear the streets, they often scream like preteens, objecting to mean officers who dare to cross them. When arrested, the trash talkers are usually terrified of being jailed or of having an arrest on their records.
Federal authorities are currently searching thousands of videos to ferret out looters, arsonists and assailants. Perpetrators
who are caught are shocked that the evidence that they once posted online in triumphant braggadocio is now being used to charge them with felonies. What is going on? Black Lives Matter, antifa and their large numbers of imitators and loosely organized wannabes are mostly made up of middle-class youth, often either students or graduates. They deem themselves the brains of the rioting, the most woke of the demonstrators, the most sophisticated of the iconoclasts. In truth, they are also the most paranoid about being charged or being hurt.
What explains the passive-aggressive nature of these protesters and rioters?
Many no doubt are indebted, with large, unpaid student loans. Few seem in a hurry to get up at 6 a.m. each day to go to work to service loans that would take years to pay in full.
While some of those arrested are professionals, many
HANSON
must meet at the seat of government, Carson City. Remote lawmakers could be anywhere in the world. His counterpart in the Assembly, Robin Titus, R-Wellington, said sick lawmakers in the past were excused from attendance but not allowed to participate or vote.
And yes, the state constitution does specify that meetings of the Legislature must be in Carson City, and yes, the point having been made, any close remote vote could later be called into question.
But there also may be a bit of regionalism baked into that objection because the Republican caucuses in both the Senate and Assembly have a majority of Northern Nevada members. They certainly don’t want to set a precedent for legislative action taken in another part
of the state, lest the peoplerich South finally make good on its threats to move the capital to Las Vegas.
That wasn’t the only constitutional debate either. Even as lawmakers pored over spreadsheets and listened to hours of testimony about the impact of cuts, some of them were being sued in Clark County District Court.
The Nevada Policy Research Institute sued nine lawmakers who also happened to work as public employees, on the grounds that under the state constitution’s separation of powers clause, people who work in the executive branch should not also serve in the legislative branch. Named in the lawsuit are Democratic leaders Cannizzaro and Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson, D-Las Vegas. A couple of Republicans were also listed.
Nevada prides itself on a part-time, citizen legislature, although the separationof-powers issue (along with some inherent conflicts of interest) could be resolved if the state had full-time lawmakers with no outside jobs. Yes, professional politics would certainly attract its share of grifters and selfaggrandizers, but Carson City is hardly free of them now.
Voters, however, have steadfastly refused to consider either a full-time Legislature or annual sessions. A common objection — the longer the Legislature meets, the greater the chance of bad laws — overlooks the obvious: Our current part-time Legislature has passed plenty of bad laws during the existing, limited sessions.
So, when bad times hit and special sessions must be called, the voters shouldn’t complain. They’re the ones who want things that way.