Burn Baby, Burn!

So, opponents of the election of Donald Trump continue to riot and vandalize property in cities where the clear majority voted against Donald Trump. #Dumbasturnips

Most of the people out protesting seem to be protesting peacefully, which is their right, of course. (Although can you imagine the media reaction if conservatives were protesting--let alone rioting against--Hillary? That would all the proof the media needed that the storm troopers of the Republicans were trying to reverse a democratic election!)

Perhaps it is a failing on my part that I didn't feel like marching about and chanting after the 2008 and 2012 elections (and after the 1992 and 1996 elections, too, I guess).

And to be fair, the violent ones tend to be anarchists and ANSWER communists rather than the weepy liberals in campus safe rooms playing with Play Doh and coloring books.

One problem is that the protesters aren't living in reality. I guess I am more qualified to be in the "reality-based community" because I never assume that people who vote for a different party are stupid or evil.

I surely think they are wrong. But I never ever demonized people who think differently than I do. Before the election, I even told my daughter that while I thought Clinton was far too corrupt to be president, that it would be a good thing to show that a woman could be president, just as it was a good thing that America showed we'd elect an African American even though I did not think President Obama has been a good president.

I told her that this is America and she is free to support whoever she wants to support. I'd love her regardless of her choices. I just told her that she should make her own decisions and not simply follow the crowd without thinking about the issues.

Disagreement can be over ideas and not on deeming the other side the embodiment of absolute evil. I realize that the right is prone to doing this, too; but our media and popular culture don't ratify that demonization the way they amplify and ratify the same tendencies on the left.

As a conservative who was raised in Detroit, went to the University of Michigan and worked for the university, worked in Lansing, and live in Ann Arbor to this day, I have never lived in a bubble. Even my time in uniform was as an enlisted man with college education. I have never lived in a bubble insulated from different viewpoints. How many liberals just never interact with conservatives except in their traumatized imagination?

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Trump dictatorship may have to be postponed from a lack of actual storm troopers on the right.

Honest to God, the Left swore that Bush 43 was going to impose a dictatorship. And then he oddly let Nancy Pelosi take charge of the House of Representatives in 2007 and refused to deploy the storm troopers to prevent Barack Obama from becoming our president in 2009.

And the last 8 years have been a macro-panic by the Left over micro-aggressions and claims that a Republican proposal for a slight reduction in the rate of growth of a federal program was literally a plan for killing people on a massive scale.

So excuse me if protester claims that this time for sure the dictatorship is arriving don't move me.

And if the dictatorship is descending, putting safety pins on your clothing isn't going to stop it. Indeed, it will make it simpler for the storm troopers to identify you.

Which shows why even the overwrought people reacting to the election don't truly believe they are in danger of being rounded up and placed in detention camps. They are acting as if they live in a free country and will continue to do so.

But maybe the Left will regain new respect for checks and balances and federalism rather than wishing (their) president could be even more powerful to overcome "obstruction" (that is, people who lawfully opposed their policy desires) at the national and state levels.

Maybe college Leftists will want to expand their tiny "free speech zones" (that they tried to corral opposition to their agenda in) to the entire country, where it belongs.

Yes, all hail the return of Holy Dissent!

UPDATE: Why yes, some of the anti-Trump protesters are professionals. (Tip to Instapundit) Of course the newspaper reported them as just everyday, ordinary folks. This appears to be different than the usual ANSWER communist and anarchist suspects being violent.