She just wanted to go to a concert, sit with some friends, and pass the time listening to music on a sultry summer evening. But she was in the heart of a state recently turned a deep shade of progressive blue. Though under no illusions that the political left was tolerant, she never expected that simply wearing a Trump hat that said “USA” and had a flag on it would trigger anything but indigestion among the progressives in her midst.

She was mistaken.

Throughout the concert, seated among his fellow progressives, one misogynistic leftist began giving her and her patriotic cap hate-filled stares. When he could no longer control his violent impulses, he rose from his seat behind her; physically kicked her out of her lawn chair; and then casually returned to his seat.

Despite several witnesses coming forward to identify her attacker and attesting to her version of events, initially the police did little. “I had to call another police officer and produce five more witnesses to convince the police that it’s wrong for a grown man to kick a woman out of her seat,” she texted me later. The leftist attacker attempted to justify his actions by telling police that he and his friends were the “educated ones.” Frustrated, she asked, “Why is the left so violent?”

It is a pressing question, and one that many others have been mulling as leftist violence continues to escalate. Trenchant commentators, such as Victor Davis Hanson and Jarrett Stepman, have cited the left’s diminished political power and its political strategy to restore it as the prime drivers of their discontented acting out. Per Stepman:

The entire country shifted to the right… Now that Trump is riding a high of political success, both foreign and domestic, the Left is seething and looking for answers. They aren’t used to being this powerless. The institutions they’ve relied on for so long to enforce their dogmas have lost their old strength. Their demands are ignored and mocked… This has all been deeply and existentially dismaying to people used to getting their way.

True, the desperation to reclaim political power and thereby coerce their fellow citizens is part of the reason for leftist violence. And since bullying and coercion are part of their political program, it shouldn’t be surprising that they aren’t above it when out of power. Yet, this explanation alone is not adequate to explain the left’s violence, and the self-righteousness they display when they commit it. The reason is less political than personal.

In substituting their secular religion of postmodernism and relativism in the place of revealed religion, the left has tried to adopt the allure of intellectual and moral superiority. This attitude of superiority is the anchor of the left’s existence. It instructs their inflated sense of self and drives their lust to dominate their fellow citizens. In resisting belief in truth, they only believe in power; “their democracy,” and the force of “50 percent plus one” is all that matters. And this explains why they loathe the concept of a constitutional republic, or anything that may slow their acquisition and exercise of arbitrary power.

When America rejected the left, leftists viewed it not as a rejection of their policies, but as a rejection of them as people. Since politics is their whole identity, the loss felt like a personal attack. One can hear it in the way they recently began mistaking (or, perhaps, conflating) profanity for profundity. As they are unable to articulate an intellectual argument in support of objective and undeniable truth—where passion and profundity are inherent—they mimic the passion and call it profound. Of course, not believing in universal or objective truths, the leftist has nothing to fall back upon but bumper sticker-style sloganeering and talking points as he attempts to asserts the rectitude of his position. It is why in every attempt at actual debate, leftists eventually just shut down, closing off the discourse often with a parting slur of accusing someone of being a Nazi.

Or, sometimes, the leftist will skip all of these steps and just kick a woman wearing a patriotic hat at a concert.

During the second half of the concert, this particular leftist slunk off into the night. His progressive friends stayed. As did our heroine. A temporary calm prevailed, though justice had not.

The Trump supporter had her own explanation for why this happened to her in that less-than-tolerant, deep-blue state: “If the roles were reversed and it was the Trump-hat woman who kicked the progressive man, I would certainly be in jail.”

She is not wrong.

And neither is Stepman, when he warns:

But we shouldn’t be complacent to the reality that if a movement like [the left’s] ever does fully take power, the reality will first be blood, then tyranny. All the repressive actions of the Biden administration will be doubled down on and magnified. On that, we should take the LARPing leftists seriously.

Amen.

Rock on, Trump-hat woman!

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-lefts-concert-of-violence