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The Left’s Shakedown and Protection Racket

By now everyone on the Right who is paying attention should be properly “woke” about the nature of today’s Left—it boils down to a relentless attempt to silence dissent on every level.

In the past month, we have seen the attempt to ban a significant and wholly legitimate news outlet from Google’s ad service, a revenue generator for many online publications. Facebook similarly has spent the past few months banning legitimate news outlets from its platform. 

Of course, ironically, Facebook’s fealty to the Left has been rewarded by a huge advertiser boycott because Facebook simply isn’t banning enough right-of-center publications. Twitter continues to ban and target conservative commentators and publications. NBC News was caught red-handed doing the bidding of radical leftist groups based in the United States and Europe, coordinating with those groups pressure Facebook, Twitter, and others into banning mainstream conservative publications and commentators, including The Federalist and American Greatness.

Meanwhile the media, Democrats, and leftist groups—seeing a massive opportunity to abandon all pretense and join forces—have launched a race-baiting and violence-inducing campaign the likes of which we have never seen in the United States. 

After months of campaigning for the destruction of the American economy through Chinese coronavirus lockdowns and bans on even the smallest gatherings of citizens, the “health and welfare” campaign of the media took a backseat to promoting LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter marches and rioting

“This Is It. This Is the Moment”

Most people with a modicum of common sense can agree that none of this is coincidental. In January, with an American economy expanding at rates most economists didn’t predict, with historic levels of African-American and Latino employment and wage growth, and America finally asserting itself on the global stage against the likes of China and Iran, the media and progressives were desperate. 

Their three-year effort to persuade Americans that the Trump White House had somehow been in the pocket of Russia had collapsed, with clear evidence that the Obama Administration and those held over like James Comey and Peter Strzok, had mounted what could best be described as an attempted coup. 

The Democrats and their allies in the media discovered that their coordinated impeachment effort actually had lost them support among the public. Their political hope now rested with a Democratic nominee who can barely put two sentences together and seems not to know where he is from moment to moment. And then the coronavirus traveled over from China and turned everything upside down.

It’s fair to say that the coming four months will not be quiet or uneventful. But regardless of the outcome of the November elections, the cancel culture, the race-baiting, and the effort to divide our nation along racial, religious, and economic lines will continue, because that is all the Democrats have to offer the American public. 

As has been well-documented, Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization with almost no interest in addressing racism, or encouraging racial reconciliation, or even justice reform. Its sole focus is the overthrow of the American Republic for a Marxist alternative. 

A New York Times story last week on a Southern food organization and its infighting over whether to remove its white, male, progressive leader, John T. Edge is worth noting. A quote struck me as both telling and a wakeup call as to where this toxic stew of division, economics, and race comes into play. “What we have is a middle-aged man who, like so many progressive Southerners, has wrestled with the demons of his white Southern past and used that to help build a better South,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, 63, a former board president and a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of North Carolina. “The reconciliation stance is no longer going to work in this nation. It’s about economics and justice. This is it. This is the moment.”

Of course, “economics and justice” are intertwined with the BLM agenda. Transferring your money, your tax dollars, your job—perhaps even your property—is what amounts to “justice” for them. This feels like a shakedown racket. Don’t believe me? Groups have been focusing on such plans for years. 

Weakening the Republic

In Minneapolis, a city that for decades has been almost fully controlled by Democrats who have done nothing to fix its supposed “systemic racism,” groups have been mapping the city’s neighborhoods and properties that once had racially restrictive covenants for home sales and purchases. 

Similar projects have been undertaken in San Francisco, where restrictive racial covenants were commonplace in the richest neighborhoods. Likewise in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. and its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. In the current environment, it’s not a stretch to see civil litigation efforts, regardless of legal standing or commonsense.

When groups organize destructive riots, when they attempt to silence legitimate voices from the public square, whether it’s Tucker Carlson on Fox News or food critic John T. Edge, or when communications companies attempt to bend to the will of the leftist mob, as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon seem to do every day, they weaken the fabric of our democracy and our liberties, and help the mob to further move the goalposts to hold their next set of victims to account. Invariably, those next victims are people who thought they were “doing right” or “making amends.” 

As Cohen-Ferris says, solidarity gestures are no longer acceptable to the Left. It’s now about money and power; what is right and just, in what was up until about five months ago the freest nation in history, be damned. 

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About Ned Ryun

Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority. You can find him on Twitter @nedryun.

Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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