By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Jeff Flake, one of Arizona’s two Republican U.S. senators who runs for office as a conservative but votes as a “moderate” — like his buddy John McCain — would seem to be the kind of politician left-wing activists should love: a squish whose principles are open to intimidation from the left.
However, portside activists enjoyed venting their spleen so much at Flake’s April 13 town-hall meeting in a Phoenix suburb that they didn’t try to reach much accommodation with the junior GOP senator from the Grand Canyon State, who was on their own side of the aisle in criticizing and opposing Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016.
Under a headline saying Flake “spars with wild crowd in (his) first town hall of the year,” the Washington Examiner posted on April 13, “The audience appeared to be comprised of mostly Democratic activists — as evident by the majority of people who protested the senator’s statements throughout the event.”
A brief video accompanied the story, with a standing crowd chanting, “Shame on you.”
This town-hall event resembled a number of others faced by Republican politicians around the U.S. recently — rowdy left-wing activists carefully assembled, not a cross-section of local opinion.
Many will recall that the fledgling Tea Party made its presence felt in politicians’ town halls in 2009 as Barack Obama prepared to cram his lie-laced Obamacare down the nation’s throat. However, the tidy Tea Party had nothing on the filthy Occupy liberal protest movement that subsequently arose to riot, then rotted away.
These days, however, something like Occupy’s offspring seems to have crawled out from the swamps to threaten people’s very safety and freedom at campuses from coast to coast if conservative guests dare to speak civilly in lecture halls.
From seething town-hall leftists to potentially deadly campus fire-bombers and fist-slinging vandals concealed with masks, the nation sees real peril forming on the left that the dominant media shrug off because newsrooms consider the thuggish disruption to be the work of their liberal pals.
If only one-hundredth of such activity were arising on the right, these same media would be screaming their heads off about looming disaster. Indeed, President Trump merely has to denounce “fake news” in order to excite more horror in the media than 1,000 leftist vandals and 1,000 abortionists out for mayhem.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon website posted a warning April 15 under the headline, “Podesta’s CAP Action partners with Town Hall Project for anti-Trump events.”
“The Center for American Progress Action Fund, the advocacy arm of an organization founded by Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, John Podesta, has partnered with a town-hall protest group for upcoming anti-Trump events during the congressional recess and beyond,” the Free Beacon reported.
“The Town Hall Project, a group that has served as the central hub for raucous town-hall events against Republican lawmakers, announced the partnership with CAP Action to amplify their efforts,” the Free Beacon said.
After protests began earlier this year, the Accuracy in Media website posted on February 23 about disruptions at the town halls of five members of Congress, from Florida to California.
Accuracy in Media said: “The Los Angeles Times gushed over the protests, which disrupt civil conversation and forced the politicians to end their town halls earlier than planned. Now, if Republicans did the same to Democratic politicians at their town halls, would they be covered favorably? Most unlikely.”
And Conservative Tribune posted on February 24: “While there are certainly some citizens with legitimate concerns regarding health care, immigration, and any number of other prominent issues, who are ready to conduct an open and honest dialogue with their lawmakers, those people are being shouted down and overwhelmed by the organized liberal groups infiltrating and hijacking the town-hall meetings.”
The Washington Examiner said there were an estimated 1,800 people at Jeff Flake’s April 13 event in the Phoenix metropolitan suburb of Mesa, hardly a hotbed of radicals.
The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily paper, reported on April 15, “Mesa is Flake’s hometown, but the audience was relentlessly hostile and unruly.”
Flake apparently did his best to accommodate the critics, extending the meeting for more than an additional hour, until after 9:30 p.m., then saying, “This has been a great evening,” the Republic said. However, a man shot back, “(Expletive) you,” the paper said.
The event was a wealth of riches for the left-leaning Republic. Here was one of its favorite “moderate” politicians being hectored by liberal activists to move further left.
The broadsheet-size Republic front page was dominated by the event, headlined, “Pointed criticism at Flake town hall,” and included two photos. Continued on page 6, the coverage included another photo and consumed half that page.
Carefully using politically correct terminology, the Republic reporter described Planned Parenthood as “the women’s health-services provider” and included an external tweet from PP President Cecile Richards about “educat(ing) U.S. senators on reproductive health policy.”
The reporter wrote nothing about PP as the nation’s largest abortion provider nor quoted any pro-life organization representative as to why funding such an organization was undesirable.
The story said that when Flake was “(r)epeatedly hammered about funding for Planned Parenthood,” he “said he was ‘sorry we have a disagreement about this’.”
The Associated Press reported April 12 that after freshman conservative Cong. Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) held his own Mesa town hall, a woman from the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert said Biggs earned her respect in a hostile situation. The AP quoted her:
“I think it was an ambush. The people who were here were not really interested in answers to their questions. They were here to jump on him. . . . I think he did very well under the circumstances.”
Back To Berkeley
The Wanderer asked three of its sources on April 17 for their reactions to the town hall and campus disruptions.
California Bay Area commentator Barbara Simpson said:
“If anyone thought the days of the Berkeley ‘free speech’ riots were over — forget it. Now that those ‘students’ are teaching in our schools and colleges and have taught our younger generations Saul Alinsky tactics, we’re seeing it in full flower again.
“The rebellious takeovers of town-hall meetings (of) legitimately elected Republican congressmen are symptomatic of the results. Reports from California to New Jersey, and states in between, are of a pattern. Protesters attend the meetings then attempt to take over with signs, demonstrations, jeers, cheers, and, increasingly, violence,” Simpson said.
“The goal is to shut it down, preventing citizens from hearing from their elected officials, whether they agree or not with their voting records. It’s an all-out attack on free speech. It’s critical that the congressmen do not allow themselves to be silenced, and it’s vital that those disrupting the proceedings are arrested and jailed,” she said.
A Marketing Problem
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard said: “While leftists will claim that what we’re seeing is the left’s version of the Tea Party that sprang up to oppose Obama’s radical agenda, this has very little in common with the Tea Party.
“Where the Tea Party was organic, this is professionally organized. Where the Tea Party was an ‘everyone pay their way’ event, these protests have massive financial support. Where the Tea Party had ordinary Americans making their own signs and speaking spontaneously, this effort has everyone holding matching professionally printed signs and asking pre-organized questions,” Querard said.
“The implications of these differences is that where the Tea Party represented a genuine reawakening of millions of Americans who got involved in future elections, the protests from the left are largely comprised of hard-core activists who were already involved. Their renewed passion is largely real and should be accounted for, but they do not seem to represent lots of new blood or energy infusing the left-wing movement,” Querard said.
“Those on the left also have a marketing problem to deal with because their natural reaction to things they don’t like is to shout it down, smash it, or set it on fire. That isn’t how you protest or rally in America if you want people to join your movement. If they keep on, decent society will start to view leftists not as someone to listen to, but as someone to be protected from,” he said.
Rob Haney, retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, headquartered in Phoenix, said:
“Just as leftist political bureaucrats and judicial appointees do not have to be instructed on how to undermine our ethical and legal processes, their allied progressive organizations in the public sector do not have to be told what to do to violently disrupt meetings and speakers.
“Disruptions against Republican congressmen and the election of President Trump are but extensions of the riots at left-wing dominated universities to silence conservative viewpoints. Ever since President (John F.) Kennedy gave the green light to allow government employees to unionize, political discourse, aided by the left, has descended into anarchy,” Haney said.
“Government, education, fire and police unions trade their money to organize and deliver the vote to Democrat Party officials who give more benefits to unions, thereby driving state and city governments into severe debt,” he said.
“Respect for rule of law, authority, virtue, and an honor system with civil discourse are hallmarks of the personality of those with conservative beliefs coming from the ‘Christian Right’,” Haney said.
“The liberal personality coming from the unbelievers of the ‘left’ is manifested by the thuggery frequently seen in union strikes or attempts to organize. These same organizations, along with their Soros allies, provide the ‘storm troopers’ for their disruptive attacks,” he said.
“Even the Tea Party rallies coming from the right were civil discourses compared to the riots coming from the left on a daily basis at our universities. As personality types, conservatives generally do not have the basic rudeness necessary to participate in discourse in the same manner as liberals. You can observe the same personalities manifested in liberal commentators and politicians on television who continually interrupt and speak over conservatives,” Haney said.
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