The Minneapolis Rally

     From the beginning of his 2015-16 campaign, Donald Trump has emphasized the mass rally as an enthusiasm-generator. It suited his showman’s style. And, obviously, it won him the presidency. But it did something else, too: something his adversaries were quick to capitalize on.

     It gave them a point of attack, against which they could unleash their most vicious tactics.

     You’ve probably seen the videos from that campaign season, featuring venomous insects such as Robert Creamer, boasting to Project Veritas’s undercover investigators about those tactics. The aftermath of the October 10 rally in Minneapolis made it clear that the Left has not abandoned those tactics for something more effective. I would surmise that they expect them to become more effective as the forces engaged in them press the limits of what the “forces of order” will permit without acting. And as I ponder the matter over my daily eight ounces of yogurt with orange marmalade added – hey, you have your rituals; I have mine – it occurs to me that the Minneapolis rally has told us something about the direction this evolution will take.

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     There are videos of the chaos and violence that followed the Minneapolis rally, generously provided by John Hinderaker’s Center of the American Experiment. They make certain aspects of the event quite clear:

• There were a great many AntiFa and AntiFa-aligned “protestors” outside the Target Center, awaiting the opportunity to harass and attack the rallygoers. At least one estimate numbered them in the thousands.
• The police cordon provided for crowd control was far smaller than that mass of Leftists.
• When the rally ended and the rallygoers emerged, Leftist attacks on them began almost at once. They included snatchings, vandalism, and violence against persons and property.
• The police failed to control the mass of Leftist attackers.
• The Leftists attacked those police who attempted to restrain them, in many cases without consequences.

     Whether the planners and agitators of that “protest” regard it as a “success” by some metric, I cannot say. It’s unlikely to have reversed the intended 2020 votes of the rallygoers. It may have dissuaded some Trump allegiants from going to future rallies in Minneapolis or other left-dominated cities. I doubt it had much of an effect on President Trump or his plans for future events of that kind. But it did illustrate a painful truth: When those who intend violence and disorder exceed a certain size, which is determined in part by the size of the local police force, the police will fail to restrain them. Traditional – i.e., non-lethal – crowd control techniques will be inadequate. Indeed, the police might be under orders to go no further regardless of developments...if they’re allowed to take any action at all.

     The Left’s tacticians are evil, but they’re neither unobservant nor stupid. They can evaluate the events of October 10 quite as easily as you and I. The coverage practically screams for them to increase the resources they’re pouring into such “protests.” They’ll strain to add more people, more weapons, more money, more community and street-level agitation, and more pressure on local officials not to dare to interfere. Whether there’s any countermeasure available to the Right, I have no idea.

     It’s all made possible by the concentration point provided by a mass in-the-flesh rally. President Trump enjoys those rallies. He clearly believes them politically worthwhile. So he’s unlikely to discontinue them. But what could he do to make them safer for the attendees who must eventually leave the site of the event and travel public streets to their homes?

     No, I have no answer for that, either.

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     Any sort of mass gathering is a potential locus of attack by persons who, for whatever reason, hope to inflict harm on those who attend it. The owners of sporting arenas know this. So do the owners of large office towers. (The owners of shopping centers will soon follow their lead.) The old Robert Shaw / Bruce Dern / Marthe Keller movie Black Sunday depicted a possible terrorist assault on such a gathering. The atrocities of September 11, 2001 made it plain that the lesson was not lost on those who hate the United States.

     The domestic enemies of order are inadequately counterbalanced by the “official” forces of order: the police. There have been calls to employ National Guard units as security when events such as those that followed the Minneapolis rally can be confidently anticipated. However, state governors have been reluctant to use them, and federalizing such a unit for the protection of political rallygoers would raise unpleasant questions.

     Who remains? The Oath Keepers? The Bikers for Trump? What unofficial force is available, under whatever conditions, that could protect peaceable Americans from the street thugs determined to suppress their right to assemble? Are the rallies, as productive as they’ve been to the Trump movement, doomed by their popularity and the ease of assaulting them? And what about other gatherings at which Leftists are likely to aim, such as campaign appearances by Republican candidates and talks by conservative speakers? Those have already known their quota of disruption, and no antidote has yet been found.

     There are plenty of smart people in the Right. I hope some of them are thinking about this, rather than leaving it to well-meaning but fundamentally useless windbags such as myself.